Jail (disambiguation)

Jail or Gaol can refer to:

• Prison, a place in which individuals are physically confined and deprived of personal freedoms.
• Jail, distinguished from "prison" in the American judicial system: a place for shorter-term confinement, as of people awaiting trial.

Although currently spelt as "jail" in American and often in British usage, "gaol" is still considered the official spelling in British English, New Zealand English, and Australian English; both spellings have the same pronunciation.

In American usage jails and prisons are different and used for different purposes, but British English does not make the same distinction.

Etymology

"Jail" and "gaol" came via Old French gaole (modern French geôle) from Late Latin gabiola: compare gabion.

Metaphorical uses

• Chroot jail, a command on Unix operating systems, a situation where the root directory is changed.
• Jail (computer security), a generic name for a sandbox mechanism which works by imposing additional resource limits on programs.
• FreeBSD jail, a miniature, secure, isolated FreeBSD environment tied to a single IP address.
• Jail is a location on the Monopoly game board.

Film

• Jail (film), a 1966 Malayalam film directed by M. Kunjako.

See also

• Gaol fever is another name for epidemic typhus.
• Gaol, earlier alternative spelling of the word "Jail", still in official use in Australia and often still used elsewhere.
• Jailhouse lawyer
• The Iroquois wind god is correctly speled "Gaol" and pronounced "ga-ol".