Definition of "enclosure"

enclosure

/ɛnˈkloʊʒəɹ/

noun
countable and uncountable, plural enclosures
1. (countable) Something enclosed, i.e. inserted into a letter or similar package.
2. (uncountable) The act of enclosing, i.e. the insertion or inclusion of an item in a letter or package.
3. (countable) An area, domain, or amount of something partially or entirely enclosed by barriers.
  Quotations
  And the village was deserted, the huts gaped black, rotting, all askew within the fallen enclosures.
  1899 February, Joseph Conrad, “The Heart of Darkness”, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, volume CLXV, number M, New York, N.Y.: The Leonard Scott Publishing Company, […], part I, page 199
4. (uncountable) The act of separating and surrounding an area, domain, or amount of something with a barrier.
5. (uncountable, by extension) The act of restricting access to ideas, works of art or technologies using patents or intellectual property laws.
  Quotations
  Copyright, from day one, was designed to be both an impediment and an incentive, a mechanism of enclosure (one that prevented the unlicensed printing of texts, thereby limiting access) and a catalyst of sorts, a structure to stimulate the production of literary goods by rewarding writers and publishers for their labor.
  2014, Astra Taylor, chapter 5, in The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, Henry Holt and Company
  The commons evokes resistance to “enclosure” in all its forms, whether in its early proto-capitalist form of fencing in commonly shared land, or in its contemporary forms of marshalling judicial restraints such as “patent” and “intellectual property” to police the ownership of ideas.
  2019, Robert Stam, World Literature, Transnational Cinema, and Global Media‎, Routledge
6. (uncountable, British History) The post-feudal process of subdivision of common lands for individual ownership.
7. (religion) The area of a convent, monastery, etc where access is restricted to community members.