Confinement may refer to
* With respect to humans:
** An old-fashioned or archaic synonym for
childbirth
Childbirth, also known as labour and delivery, is the ending of pregnancy where one or more babies exits the internal environment of the mother via vaginal delivery or caesarean section. In 2019, there were about 140.11 million births globall ...
**
Postpartum confinement
Postpartum confinement is a traditional practice following childbirth. Those who follow these customs typically begin immediately after the birth, and the seclusion or special treatment lasts for a culturally variable length: typically for one mon ...
(or postnatal confinement), a system of recovery after childbirth, involving rest and special foods
**
Civil confinement
Some jurisdictions may commit certain types of dangerous sex offenders to state-run detention facilities following the completion of their sentence if that person has a "mental abnormality" or personality disorder that makes the person likely to ...
for psychiatric patients
**
Solitary confinement
Solitary confinement is a form of imprisonment in which the inmate lives in a single cell with little or no meaningful contact with other people. A prison may enforce stricter measures to control contraband on a solitary prisoner and use additi ...
, a strict form of imprisonment
**
Home care Homecare (also spelled as home care) is health care or supportive care provided by a professional caregiver in the individual home where the patient or client is living, as opposed to care provided in group accommodations like clinics or nursing ho ...
supported living
* The confinement of an animal specimen in a
zoo
A zoo (short for zoological garden; also called an animal park or menagerie) is a facility in which animals are kept within enclosures for public exhibition and often bred for Conservation biology, conservation purposes.
The term ''zoological g ...
* In physics:
**
Color confinement
In quantum chromodynamics (QCD), color confinement, often simply called confinement, is the phenomenon that color-charged particles (such as quarks and gluons) cannot be isolated, and therefore cannot be directly observed in normal conditions be ...
, the physical principle explaining the non-observation of color charged particles like free quarks
**
Confinement of thermonuclear plasmas, as a requirement to obtain fusion energy
**
Confined liquid, by pores or similar
**
Quantum confinement
A potential well is the region surrounding a local minimum of potential energy. Energy captured in a potential well is unable to convert to another type of energy (kinetic energy in the case of a gravitational potential well) because it is captur ...
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