"blue law" meaning in English

See blue law in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Forms: blue laws [plural]
Etymology: Unknown Etymology templates: {{unk|en}} Unknown Head templates: {{en-noun}} blue law (plural blue laws)
  1. (Canada, US, now historical) A restrictive religious-based law in colonial New England, especially preventing leisure activities on a Sunday. Tags: Canada, US, historical
    Sense id: en-blue_law-en-noun-iSd1MSVq Categories (other): American English, Canadian English, English entries with incorrect language header Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 54 46
  2. (Canada, US) By extension, any puritanical or restrictive law, especially one that prohibits or restricts commercial activity on a Sunday. Tags: Canada, US
    Sense id: en-blue_law-en-noun-ERCDNMKF Categories (other): American English, Canadian English, English entries with incorrect language header Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 54 46

Inflected forms

Download JSON data for blue law meaning in English (2.4kB)

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        "A restrictive religious-based law in colonial New England, especially preventing leisure activities on a Sunday."
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        "(Canada, US, now historical) A restrictive religious-based law in colonial New England, especially preventing leisure activities on a Sunday."
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          "ref": "2001, David Sedaris, diary entry January 22, in Theft by Finding, Back Bay Books 2017, p. 441",
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        "A restrictive religious-based law in colonial New England, especially preventing leisure activities on a Sunday."
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          "ref": "2001, David Sedaris, diary entry January 22, in Theft by Finding, Back Bay Books 2017, p. 441",
          "text": "[I]t's actually a way around the Swiss blue laws demanding that shops close from Saturday afternoon until Monday morning. The laws apply everywhere but the airport, so they built a massive supermarket in the Swiss Air terminal."
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-06 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). 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.