cubbyhole

See also: cubby hole

English

Etymology

From cubby ‎ hole.

Noun

cubbyhole (plural cubbyholes)

1. A small, snug room which may be used as a place of privacy and safety by children
2. A small compartment; a pigeonhole
3. A glove compartment

Translations

a small, snug room

• Dutch: verdwijnhoekje n
• Italian: cubicolo (it)
• Polish: izdebka (pl) f, klitka (pl) f, kanciapa (pl) f, pokoik (pl) m
• Portuguese: cubículo m
• Russian: ую́тное месте́чко n (ujútnoje mestéčko), ко́мнатка (ru) f (kómnatka), закуто́к (ru) m (zakutók)
• Swedish: krypin (sv) n

pigeonhole — see pigeonhole

glove compartment — see glove compartment

Verb

cubbyhole (third-person singular simple present cubbyholes, present participle cubbyholing, simple past and past participle cubbyholed)

1. To restrict, limit or narrowly define; to pigeonhole.
   • 1989, ASNE: Proceedings of the 1989 Convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, page 13:

     Rivera: The world has changed. It is no longer cubbyholed. I do not think — Friendly: What do you mean cubbyholed? Rivera: I do not think the definition of journalist is as narrowly construed these days as perhaps it was once.

   • 1994, Rita Dove, ““Either I’m Noboby, or I’m a Nation””, in Herbert A. Leibowitz, editor, Parnassus: Twenty Years of Poetry in Review, The University of Michigan Press, →ISBN, page 244:

     A true Renaissance man, Walcott has consistently resisted being cubbyholed. He has rejected neither his Caribbean heritage nor his British education.

   • 2006, J. J. Fucini, S. Fucini, “A Third-Culture Plant”, in Ed Rhodes, James P. Warren, Ruth Carter, editors, Supply Chains and Total Product Systems: A Reader, The Open University; Blackwell Publishing, page 289:

     The Americans wanted to have enclosed offices, or at the very least, shoulder-high partitions cubbyholing individual desks.

   • 2011, Eric Rentschler, “Rudolf Arnheim’s Early Passage Between Social and Aesthetic Film Criticism”, in Scott Higgins, editor, Arnheim for Film and Media Studies, Routledge, pages 62–63:

     And, if we do so, it would be useful to bear in mind Sloterdijk’s insights regarding the amphibian quality of discourse within the Weimar Republic and the compelling ways in which it eludes easy generalization and comfortable cubbyholing.

   • 2013, Bonnie Biafore, QuickBooks 2014: The Missing Manual, O’Reilly:

     Delimited files and spreadsheets compartmentalize data by separating each piece of info with a comma or a tab, or by cubbyholing them into columns and rows in a spreadsheet file.

   • 2015, Vince Meconi, A Practical Guide to Government Management, Bernan Press, The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., →ISBN, pages 83 and 89:

     In the current era, there is too much demand for customer service and the restrains on budgets too great for you to allow cubbyholing. […] And finally, out of necessity, a small organization like ours, with an increasing workload, could not afford to cubbyhole anyone, let alone 10 percent of our workforce. I advised my directors of my expectation that everybody had to work, that there was to be no cubbyholing, and that there would be no exceptions.

   • 2015, Regina O. Obe, Leo S. Hsu, PostgreSQL: Up and Running: A Practical Introduction to the Advanced Open Source Database, 2nd edition, O’Reilly:

     If you have more than two dozen databases on your server, consider cubbyholing them into schemas in a single database.

References

• “cubbyhole”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.