"Terry stop" meaning in English

See Terry stop in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Forms: Terry stops [plural]
Etymology: From the legal case Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968), in which the Supreme Court held that police may briefly detain a person who they reasonably suspect is involved in criminal activity. Head templates: {{en-noun}} Terry stop (plural Terry stops)
  1. (US, law enforcement) The brief detention of a person by the police on reasonable suspicion of involvement in criminal activity but short of probable cause to arrest. Wikipedia link: Terry v. Ohio Tags: US Related terms: Terry search

Inflected forms

{
  "etymology_text": "From the legal case Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968), in which the Supreme Court held that police may briefly detain a person who they reasonably suspect is involved in criminal activity.",
  "forms": [
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  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        {
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          "name": "American English",
          "parents": [],
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        }
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        "The brief detention of a person by the police on reasonable suspicion of involvement in criminal activity but short of probable cause to arrest."
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      "id": "en-Terry_stop-en-noun-0rIjxcvZ",
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        [
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        [
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        [
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        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(US, law enforcement) The brief detention of a person by the police on reasonable suspicion of involvement in criminal activity but short of probable cause to arrest."
      ],
      "related": [
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  ],
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}
{
  "etymology_text": "From the legal case Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968), in which the Supreme Court held that police may briefly detain a person who they reasonably suspect is involved in criminal activity.",
  "forms": [
    {
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    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
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  "related": [
    {
      "word": "Terry search"
    }
  ],
  "senses": [
    {
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        "English countable nouns",
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        "English eponyms",
        "English lemmas",
        "English multiword terms",
        "English nouns",
        "Pages with 1 entry",
        "Pages with entries",
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      ],
      "glosses": [
        "The brief detention of a person by the police on reasonable suspicion of involvement in criminal activity but short of probable cause to arrest."
      ],
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      "raw_glosses": [
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}

Download raw JSONL data for Terry stop meaning in English (1.4kB)


This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2026-03-25 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2026-03-03 using wiktextract (05c257f and 9d9a410). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.