contain.
To hold inside.
Meaning & usage
To hold inside.
The brown box contains three stacks of books.
a spray bottle containing water.
To include as a part.
Most of the meals they offer contain meat.
To put constraints upon; to restrain; to confine; to keep within bounds.
I'm so excited, I can hardly contain myself!
To have as an element or subset.
A group contains a unique inverse for each of its elements.
If that subgraph contains the vertex in question then it must be spanning.
To restrain desire; to live in continence or chastity.
Where this word comes from
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *ḱe? Proto-Indo-European *ḱóm Proto-Italic *kom Proto-Italic *kom- Latin con- Proto-Indo-European *ten- Proto-Indo-European *-yéti Proto-Indo-European *tn̥eh₁yéti Proto-Italic *tenēō Latin teneō Latin contineōder. Latin continērelbor. Old French contenirbor. Middle English conteinen English contain From Middle English conteinen, borrowed from Old French contenir, from Latin continēre (“to hold or keep together, comprise, contain”), combined form of con- (“together”) + teneō (“to hold”).
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.