closing off
3
5.2
- noun
- /ˈkloʊzɪŋ ɔf/
:
cierre
- The city plans to implement a closing off of the main avenue during the festival to create a safe space for pedestrians.
Examples
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This involved closing off most of the roads into the city and choking traffic through a number of manned police checkpoints.
Blog text (34) -
Closing off the tunnels is very important for the siege to be successful.
Blog text (19) -
Competition was further reduced by the closing off of domestic markets from imports from the West.
Academic text (1990) -
Last week, Patch had ideas about closing off Old Town streets, which would also take away parking.
Blog text (23) -
By closing off most of the stomach to food, people who received bariatric surgery ate less and, therefore, lost weight.
Blog text (28) -
So the June protest in Turkey can be seen as the closing of the cynical distance to politics in Turkey.
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But for Hamilton, it also allowed the creation of artificial environments by visually closing off separate spaces.
Academic text (2000) -
The country, whose industrial and military might had tipped the balance and ended the bloody stalemate of the Great War, turned inward, closing off immigration, its historic lifeblood, and barricading trade, sending the entire globe into economic free fall.
Blog text (6) -
As the legal possibilities to enter Europe have diminished in the last decade, especially by closing off entry to the welfare state to illegal immigrants, 32 Turkish first and second-generation migrants are much more hesitant than in the past to give in to requests from family in Turkey to choose marriage partners from the home country or to take care of new (often illegal) migrants.
Academic text (2002) -
But her essential point—that contemporary American elites, by acting exclusively according to what is in their interest in the short term by extracting our collective wealth for themselves and closing off opportunities for social mobility to others, are in the long run sowing the seeds of destruction for themselves, our economy, and our society.
Blog text (14)
Synonyms
305
2.3
The last part when something ends, for example a meeting
172
3.7
A state of being alone and cut off from other people physically or emotionally
27
4.4
A blockage that stops liquid or air moving through a pipe
3
1.0
An action that makes something closed like a door or book
2
4.4
Closing off an area by surrounding it with a fence or barrier
How Isolated
Surface Forms
Morphology
The noun 'closing off' is directly compositional from 'close' (shut/bring to an end) plus the particle 'off' (separating/removing access), yielding the straightforward sense of shutting or blocking access. This verb+particle pattern is common and predictable in English (and similarly expressed in many other languages), so a B1 learner who knows the constituents would understand the meaning.
Etymology
The noun closing off may come from the simple image of someone shutting a gate or putting a barrier across a road to stop people entering. The parts close (to shut) and off (to stop access) explain the idea of 'isolating' or 'preventing access', so today it means the act of separating or blocking something.