Containment is keeping a danger inside a limited area. Containment of the fire, a containment building, containment measures.
In an outbreak it means stopping the spread while the numbers are still small, which stops working once they are not. A containment building is the concrete shell round a reactor. In the Cold War, containment was the name of the whole American strategy.
1nouncontainmentKeeping a danger inside a limited area.
“Firefighters said the containment of the wildfire would take several more days.”
containment is a keeping in.
Old French
contenir
Middle English
conteinen
English
contain
English, today
containment
Built from
From contain + -ment. contain comes from Middle English conteinen, from Old French contenir. From Middle English conteinen, borrowed from Old French contenir, from Latin continēre (“to hold or keep together, comprise, contain”), combined form of con- (“together”) + teneō (“to hold”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA