Boundaries are the limits you set on what other people may ask of you. Not answering work email at midnight, and saying so out loud.
The plural is where this modern sense lives: setting boundaries, having good boundaries, somebody who does not respect boundaries. It came out of therapy and reached ordinary speech within a generation. The older meaning is fully alive and entirely physical — the boundaries of a field, a county, a garden — and in cricket the boundary is the rope round the edge of the ground. To push the boundaries is to go further than anyone has gone before.
1nounboundariesThe limits you set on what others may ask of you.
“She is much better at keeping boundaries now.”
2nounlinesThe lines marking the edge of an area.
“The stream marks the boundaries of the farm.”
Practised in A Man Called Ove, Mental Health & Wellbeing
First appears in chapter 10 of A Man Called Ove.
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