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PlainSpell

debarment

/di-ˈbär-mənt/noun

debarment is a noun meaning “The act or an instance of debarring” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled D-E-B-A-R-M-E-N-T and has 3 syllables, and it appears about once in every 25 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of debarment is debarments.

What does debarment mean?

noun

  1. 1

    The act or an instance of debarring.

  2. 2

    USIn the United States Food and Drugs Act, a penalty imposed on persons or companies that commit crimes in connection with applications for approval of drugs, in which such persons are barred from submitting or assisting in the submission of such an application.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce debarment?

  • UK /dɪˈbɑːmənt/
  • US /di-ˈbär-mənt/

Debarment has 3 syllables (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Yangolin-debarment.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of debarment

  • debarments plural

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is debarment?

Debarment appears about once in every 25 million words in written English, the 152,206th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Debarment in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

In the sense The act, an instance of debarring:

LanguageWords
GermanAusschluss

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does debarment come from?

From debar + -ment.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).