verb
definition
To use one's authority to lay claim to and separate a possession from its holder.
example
In schools it is common for teachers to confiscate electronic games and other distractions.
Examples of confiscating in a Sentence
More questionable was Josephs policy in closing and confiscating the property of 213 of the richer monasteries of the land.
There, on the 16th of December, he issued a decree (omitted from the official Correspondence) declaring le nomsne Stein an enemy of France and confiscating his property in the lands allied to France.
An Act of Attainder (repealed in 1819) was passed, confiscating his property; and his wife - against whom the government probably possessed sufficient evidence to secure a conviction for treason - was compelled to leave the country before her husband had actually expirbd.
The civil power, further, stepped in to aid the ecclesiastical, and denounced him as a rebel, imprisoning his person and confiscating his goods.
Congress in August 1861 passed an act (approved August 6th) confiscating rights of slave-owners to slaves employed in hostile service against the Union.
They suffered, not only from the regular taxes, which were seldom remitted even after bad seasons, but also from monopolies; and Procopius goes so far as to allege that the emperor made a practice of further recruiting his treasury by confiscating on slight or fictitious pretexts the property of persons who had displeased Theodora or himself.
As to the family of his predecessor, he contented himself with confiscating their possessions, with the single exception of Suleiman b.
In the Viginia House of Delegates, as in the Continental Congress, he opposed the further issue of paper money; and he tried to induce the legislature to repeal the law confiscating British debts, but he did not lose sight of the interests of the Confederacy.
Upon the fall of Lucknow Lord Canning's Oudh proclamation was issued, confiscating almost the entire lands of the province, and ensuring only their lives to those rebels who should submit at once.
The only result of the long series of insurrections was to provoke the king to a cruelty which he had not at first shown, and to give him an excuse for confiscating and dividing among his foreign knights and barons the immense majority of the estates of the English theglihood.
He had scotched the faction of Hasmonaean sympathizers by killing forty-five members of the Sanhedrin and confiscating their possessions.
The estates of absentees were vested in the crown, and, as only two months law was given, this was nearly equivalent to confiscating the property of all Protestants.
Charles summoned the duke to Paris in 1378, and on his non-appearance committed one of his rare errors of policy by confiscating his duchy.
On the 25th of January 1852, in consequence of the decree confiscating the property of the Orleans family, x.
Still more serious an encroachment upon the constitution perhaps even than the institution of the major-generals was Cromwell's tampering with the municipal franchise by confiscating the charters, depriving the burgesses, now hostile to his government, of their parliamentary votes, and limiting the franchise to the corporation; thereby corrupting the national liberties at their very source, and introducing an evil precedent only too readily followed by Charles II.