metes and bounds
Americanplural noun
Etymology
Origin of metes and bounds
1275–1325; late Middle English; translation of Anglo-French metes et boundes. See mete 2, bound 3
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Portuguese Bend residents generally favor a system more in tune with metes and bounds, a mapping method that uses physical landmarks such as trees, walls and roads to measure parcels.
From Los Angeles Times • Mar. 6, 2023
“Perhaps, although the lack of clarity about the metes and bounds of the restricted area and the Vice President’s movements on January 6th undermine this argument.”
From Seattle Times • Mar. 21, 2022
Statisticians cannot say more than they know and the data constrain the conclusion to be within the metes and bounds of the data.
From Textbooks • Nov. 29, 2017
Surveyors were mapping out metes and bounds to tame the jumbled countryside with the gridiron pattern we know today.
From New York Times • Dec. 1, 2010
For both, this was the West, the free, unbounded, illimitable, exhaustless West—Homeric, Titanic, scornful to metes and bounds, having no scale of little things.
From The Girl at the Halfway House A Story of the Plains by Hough, Emerson
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
