corral

plural corrals

1. An enclosure for livestock, especially a circular one.

   We had a small corral out back where we kept our pet llama.

   Synonyms: pen, stockade

2. An enclosure or area to concentrate a dispersed group.

   Please return the shopping carts to the corral.

3. A circle of wagons, either for the purpose of trapping livestock, or for defense.

   The wagon train formed a corral to protect against Comanche attacks.

present singular third person corrals · US participle present corraling · UK participle present corralling · US participle past corraled · US past corraled · UK participle past corralled · UK past corralled

1. To capture or round up.

   Between us, we managed to corral the puppies in the kitchen.

   3 more examples

   I corralled the judge, and we started off across the fields, in no very mild state of fear of that gentleman's wife, whose vigilance was seldom relaxed. And thus we came by a circuitous route to Mohair, the judge occupied by his own guilty thoughts, and I by others not less disturbing.

   1897 December (indicated as 1898), Winston Churchill, chapter VIII, in The Celebrity: An Episode, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., →OCLC

   By the end of this year the work of 168 coal depots scattered throughout the Birmingham Division will have been coralled [sic] into about two dozen concentration depots.

   1964 March, “News and Comment: Coal concentration in Birmingham”, in Modern Railways, page 152

   They provide an unprecedented inside view of the continuing clampdown in Xinjiang, in which the authorities have corralled as many as a million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs and others into internment camps and prisons over the past three years.

   2019 November 16, Austin Ramzy, Chris Buckley, “‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims”, in New York Times

2. To place inside of a corral.

   After we corralled the last steer, we headed off to the chuck wagon for dinner.

3. To make a circle of vehicles, as of wagons so as to form a corral.

   The cattle drivers corralled their wagons for the night.

plural Corrals

1. A surname.