prohibition

[proh-uh-bish-uhn]

noun

1. the act of prohibiting.

2. the legal prohibiting of the manufacture and sale of alcoholic drinks for common consumption.

3. Often Prohibition the period (1920–33) when the Eighteenth Amendment was in force and alcoholic beverages could not legally be manufactured, transported, or sold in the United States.

4. a law or decree that forbids.

   Synonyms: interdiction

Prohibition

¹

/ ˌprəʊɪˈbɪʃən /

noun

1. the period (1920–33) when the manufacture, sale, and transportation of intoxicating liquors was banned by constitutional amendment in the US

prohibition

²

/ ˌprəʊɪˈbɪʃən /

noun

1. the act of prohibiting or state of being prohibited

2. an order or decree that prohibits

3. (sometimes capital) (esp in the US) a policy of legally forbidding the manufacture, transportation, sale, or consumption of alcoholic beverages except for medicinal or scientific purposes

4. law an order of a superior court (in Britain the High Court) forbidding an inferior court to determine a matter outside its jurisdiction

Prohibition

1. The outlawing of alcoholic beverages nationwide from 1920 to 1933, under an amendment to the Constitution. The amendment, enforced by the Volstead Act, was repealed by another amendment to the Constitution in 1933.

Prohibition is often mentioned in discussions of how much social change can be brought about through law, because alcohol was widely, though illegally, produced and sold during Prohibition; it was served privately in the White House under President Warren Harding, for example.

Many use the example of Prohibition to argue that more harm than good comes from the enactment of laws that are sure to be widely disobeyed.

Some states and localities (called “dry”) had outlawed the production and sale of alcohol before the Prohibition amendment was adopted. The repealing amendment allowed individual states and localities to remain “dry,” and some did for many years.

Other Word Forms

• Prohibitionist noun
• prohibitionary adjective
• antiprohibition adjective
• nonprohibition noun
• preprohibition noun

Word History and Origins

Origin of Prohibition¹

First recorded in 1275–1325; Middle English, from Latin prohibitiōn-, stem of prohibitiō “prevention”; equivalent to prohibit + -ion

Example Sentences

"Not only does the strike appear to have violated the prohibition on the use of force, it also runs afoul of the right to life under international human rights law."

From BBC

But some residents interpreted this as a blanket prohibition on feeding dogs.

From BBC

For all his storied complexity, Pynchon has long admired an old-fashioned mystery, from 1966’s “The Crying of Lot 49” to 2009’s “Inherent Vice” to this, an ersatz detective story set during the final days of Prohibition.

From Los Angeles Times

The instructor stated a chemical weapons attack in the Syrian city of Douma in 2018, by the Russian-backed Assad regime, was a "canonical example of fake news", ignoring findings of a two-year investigation by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons confirming the attacks were carried out by the Syrian Air Force.

From BBC

The Weimar-German constitution of 1919 was very liberal — far more so than the U.S. at the time, which was groaning under Prohibition, with most Black citizens excluded from voting and the Klan dominating many state legislatures — yet it collapsed in little more than a dozen years.

From Salon

Related Words

• constraint 
• embargo 
• exclusion 
• injunction 
• prevention 
• proscription 
• restriction 
• taboo 
• veto 

When To Use

When was Prohibition?

Prohibition refers to a period in American history when the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcoholic beverages was made illegal. The law, which was created by the Eighteenth Amendment (ratified in 1918) to the United States Constitution and subsequently reversed by the Twenty-first Amendment (ratified in 1933), proved largely unpopular.