Meaning & use
emancipate
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Meanings
verbtransitiveformal
To set a person or group free from slavery or from unfair legal and social control.
Grammar: Takes an object, often followed by from: emancipate them from slavery.
Patterns
- emancipate someone from something
- emancipate a group
The law emancipated enslaved people across the country.
Reformers worked to emancipate women from legal restrictions.
The decree emancipated the peasants from their landlords.
verbtransitivefigurativeformal
To free someone from a limiting habit, belief, or influence.
Grammar: Used figuratively, often with a reflexive object: emancipate yourself from old ideas.
Patterns
- emancipate yourself from something
Education helped emancipate her from fear of failure.
He tried to emancipate his thinking from old prejudices.
The invention emancipated workers from heavy labor.
verbtransitivelegalAmerican
In law, to give a young person the legal rights of an adult before the usual age.
Grammar: Often passive: the teenager was emancipated by the court.
Patterns
- be emancipated by someone
The court emancipated the sixteen-year-old so she could sign contracts.
He was emancipated at seventeen and lived on his own.
A judge may emancipate a minor in rare cases.
Word forms
| third person singular | emancipates |
|---|---|
| past tense and past participle | emancipated |
| present participle | emancipating |
Common combinations
- emancipate slaves
- The proclamation sought to emancipate slaves.
- emancipate women
- The movement aimed to emancipate women from legal limits.
- emancipated minor
- As an emancipated minor, she managed her own money.
- emancipate from
- They hoped to emancipate the town from poverty.
- emancipate yourself
- He tried to emancipate himself from his past.
Synonyms and how they differ
- liberate
- Liberate is used for freeing people from enemy control or oppression, often by force, while emancipate is mostly legal or social.
- free
- Free is the common everyday word, while emancipate sounds formal and historical.
- release
- Release suggests letting someone out of confinement, not changing their legal status.
- enfranchise
- Enfranchise means to give someone the right to vote, a narrower kind of freeing than emancipate.
Opposites
Word family
- emancipation noun
- the act of setting free
- emancipated adjective
- free from restrictions
- emancipator noun
- a person who sets others free
- emancipatory adjective
- aimed at setting free
Commonly confused: emancipate or emancipate vs. emaciate?
emancipate vs emancipate vs. emaciate
Emaciate means to make extremely thin through hunger or illness, and has nothing to do with freedom.
Practice
The reformers fought to ___ workers from unfair contracts that kept them in debt.
Choose one answer.
Emancipate means to free from unfair control. Imprison, employ, and annoy do not describe freeing someone from contracts.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “emancipate”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.