manacle

Mostly I just fret, worry-beading minor problems and irritations until they form a manacle of woe.

From New York Times ● Jan. 5, 2019

He even got a leg manacle removed so that he could move freely about the courtroom.

From Time Magazine Archive

Within these limitations, the show covers an astonishing range, which should prove to even the most doctrinaire of abstractionists that an attachment to reality is not necessarily a manacle for the mind.

From Time Magazine Archive

The prince's fingers locked on Jemmy's arm like a manacle.

From "The Whipping Boy" by Sid Fleischman

As the werewolf wrenched itself free of the manacle binding it, the dog seized it about the neck and pulled it backward, away from Ron and Pettigrew.

From "Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban" by J.K. Rowling

“He said he’d go to his grave with the manacles of Iraq,” said retired Col.

From Seattle Times ● Mar. 22, 2023

Winters, we can look across the vast eastward miles, and regard with pity the icebound, housebound millions in the manacles of winter.

From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 29, 2022

In so doing, he has posed the question of what mind-forg'd manacles keep three, British-born, young men enslaved to a pair of unscrupulous builders.

From BBC ● Dec. 15, 2020

Houdini, he said, “used to practice his underwater escapes in manacles and chains in the pool,” a fact that delights him, because he was an avid magician as a child.

From New York Times ● Aug. 4, 2018

The manacles were black iron, thick and heavy, each weighing a good two pounds, if the dwarf was any judge.

From "A Dance with Dragons" by George R. R. Martin

He stays gruff, of course, but you sense that Ray is as manacled by his authoritarian role as Colin literally is in his hungry, slurping devotion to his master.

From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 5, 2026

There were no triumphal demonstrations, in the tradition of ancient Rome, with manacled Russian captives and their plundered treasures paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue.

From Salon ● Mar. 3, 2019

“I am leashed it looks like, manacled; cobwebbed, that’s closer,” she says.

From Slate ● Aug. 9, 2018

On any given day, hundreds of people course through the narrow corridors — lawyers, manacled prisoners and their families.

From New York Times ● Aug. 15, 2017

I am leashed, it looks like, manacled; cobwebbed, that’s closer.

From "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood

Where is their evidence that manacling our language to past usage is at all helpful or necessary?

From The Guardian ● Jun. 12, 2010

It was equivalent to putting out a man's eyes, and then asserting boldly that he cannot see; of manacling his ankles, and charging him with the inability to run.

From History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens by George Washington Williams

Is it possible that the gyves he had thought to have cast off for ever are here, manacling him again as soon as he tries to make one free step?

From Doctor Cupid by Rhoda Broughton

Flashing his torch round, Tom noticed that the flooring had been worn and chipped away, no doubt in the process of manacling, and scattered about there was a large quantity of loose particles of brick.

From King of the Air Or, To Morocco on an Aeroplane by Herbert Strang

The manacling of Mr. Davis delayed the work of reconstruction for years, and did much to restore the feeling of sectional hatred which fair fighting had overcome.

From Perley's Reminiscences, v. 1-2 of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis by Benjamin Perley Poore