Trammel

Trammel (pronounced tram-uhl)

(1) A hindrance or impediment to free action or movement; restraint (used usually in the plural as trammels); an inhibition.

(2) An instrument for drawing ellipses.

(3) In engineering, as trammel wheel, a circular plate or a cross, with two or more cross grooves intersecting at the centre, used on the end of a shaft to transmit motion to another shaft not in line with the first.

(4) A device for drawing ellipses consisting of a flat sheet of metal, plastic or wood having, a cruciform slot (a cross with two grooves at right angles to each other) in which run two pegs attached to a beam, the free end of the beam describing an ellipse, usually by means of an attached pencil (known also as a Trammel of Archimedes).

(5) A gauge-like device used to align or adjust parts of a machine (also known as a tram).

(6) A net (for the trapping of fish or birds) in three sections the two outer nets having a large mesh and the middle a fine mesh (also called a trammel net or a fowling net).

(7) A vertical bar with several notches or chain of rings suspended over a fire, used to hang cooking pots by a hook (the mechanism providing a simple means of adjusting the height(s)).  They would originally have been improvised and known also as “trammel rings”.

(8) Braids or plaits of hair (the idea being the “trameling” of the hair in the sense of restraining its natural movement).

(9) An alternative name for the beam compass (often in the plural).

(10) A fetter or shackle, especially one used in training a horse to amble (the trammel tying together each pair of a horse's legs (on the same side), forcing the horse to amble.

(11) To involve or hold in trammels; restrain; to hobble or curb; to obstruct, impede, hinder or encumber; to impose a drag upon.

(12) To catch or entangle in or as in a net.

(13) To hinder or restrain

(14) To catch or ensnare

(15) To produce an accurate setting of a machine (the adjustment not necessarily effected with the use of a trammel).

1325–1375: From the Middle English tramayle, from the Old & Middle French tramail (fine-gauged fishnet, a variant of tremail (three-mesh net)), from the Medieval Latin tramallum, from the Late Latin trēmaculum (assumed to mean “a net made from three layers of meshes”), the construct being the Latin trē(s) (three) + macula (hole; mesh in a net, spot, speck; cell).  It was cognate with the Spanish trasmallo (drift net) and the Italian tramaglio (trammel), both French loan words.  The meaning “anything that hinders” dates from the 1650s, the original sense being the late fifteenth century use to mean “a hobble for a horse”.  In English in the 1580s it was used also to mean a “net for binding up a woman's tresses” (ie a hair-net) while the seemingly curious use as “trammel-wheel” dates from 1877 and picked up the name because the slots were vaguely reminiscent of trammels already in use.  The verb entrammel (to entangle) was in use by the 1590s while the adjective untrammeled dates from at least the 1790s and is the form of the word in widest use today (in the sense of “unhindered; unrestricted”).  The verb in the figurative sense of “hinder; restrain” dates from 1727 and developed from the idea of “binding a horse’s legs with a trammel”, a technique first noted in the late sixteenth century.  The earlier use of the verb was to describe “the binding of a corpse”, first noted in the 1530s.  Trammel & trammeling are nouns & verbs, trammeler is a noun and trammeled is a verb; the noun plural is trammels.

Because of the way Google harvests data for their ngrams, they’re not literally a tracking of the use of a word in society but can be usefully indicative of certain trends, (although one is never quite sure which trend(s)), especially over decades.  As a record of actual aggregate use, ngrams are not wholly reliable because: (1) the sub-set of texts Google uses is slanted towards the scientific & academic and (2) the technical limitations imposed by the use of OCR (optical character recognition) when handling older texts of sometime dubious legibility (a process AI should improve).  Where numbers bounce around, this may reflect either: (1) peaks and troughs in use for some reason or (2) some quirk in the data harvested.

Lindsay Lohan with trammeled hair (braids are plaits can be so described because the hair is being “restrained”).

The multiple (and often disparent (in the obsolete sense)) meanings of “trammel” are an example of the way in English language evolves, words developing new meanings through processes like metaphorical extension, functional shift, and semantic broadening.  The original use was to describe a type of fishing net with three layers and this idea of “catch or entangle” was later used by metaphorical extension to refer to things restricting or hindering movement (as a net certainly does to confined fish).  Over time, this led to many meanings related to restraint, especially in equine training where a “trammel” was an apparatus (made almost always from leather & cord) restricting the movement of a horses legs, compelling them to restrict their gait to an amble.  In engineering, there have been a number of tools in both carpentry and metalworking called “trammel” and they tend to be used either (1) to describe circles or arcs or (2) a gauge-like device used to align or adjust parts of a machine (also known as a tram).  In linguistics, such a process is sometimes described as a “broader semantic shift” but in the matter of “trammel” it was more of a “cumulative build” in that although sometimes any connection to the original seemed remote, there was always some link and from the original fish nets, “trammel” has come to be used of anything that restrains or impedes, whether physical, legal, or metaphorical; the form “untrammeled” (often as untrammelled in non-North American use) now in more common use.

Trammel of Archimedes (an ellipse generator mechanism).

The ellipsograph is a mechanism used to generate the shape of an ellipse and one of the best known is the “Trammel of Archimedes, built with two shuttles which are confined (ie trammeled within) two perpendicular channels or rails and a rod which is attached to the shuttles by pivots at fixed positions along the rod.  As the shuttles move back and forth, each along its channel, the rod moves in an elliptical path and the size of the ellipse described can be varied by the location at which a pencil is attached.  Despite the name, there’s no evidence linking the design to the Ancient Greek polymath Archimedes of Syracuse (circa 287–circa 212 BC) and the name was chosen as a tribute to his seminal contributions to science and engineering, notably his study of the geometry of ellipses.