Other forms: embargoes, embargoed
An embargo is an official ban on trade with a country — no ships in, no goods out, by order of a government. Picture a port where the cranes have stopped and the containers sit where they were last put down.
Governments impose an embargo, tighten it, and lift it, and it takes ON: an embargo ON oil, ON arms. It works as a verb, with a spelling worth noting in the past tense: the shipment was embargoed. Journalism has borrowed the word for something far smaller — a press embargo is an agreement not to publish before an agreed hour, so reporters get the report on Monday and the embargo lifts at midnight on Thursday. An embargo is not the same as a sanction: sanctions are the whole toolkit of punishments, and the embargo is the one about goods crossing a border. The plural takes an E: embargoes.
1nounembargoAn official ban on trade with a country.~85%
“The embargo on arms sales stayed in place for eleven years.”
synonyms: ban, blockade
2nounmarketingAn agreement not to publish a story before an agreed time.~11%
“The report is under embargo until midnight on Thursday.”
3verbplaceTo place an official ban on trade in something.~4%
“The whole shipment was embargoed at the port.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 27 sentences found in the wild and placed 27 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: trade ban
Embargo is Spanish, from embargar, to arrest or seize — Spain used it for holding ships in port. Behind that stands late Latin imbarricāre, to bar, built on barra, a bar or barrier. The picture inside the word is the simplest one there is: a pole across the way, and nothing gets past.
Vulgar Latin
*barra — bar, barrier
Latin
*imbarricāre — to bar
Spanish
embargar — to arrest
English, today
embargo
From Spanish embargar (“to arrest”), from late Latin imbarricāre (“to bar”), from Latin in- + Vulgar Latin barra (“bar, barrier”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA