contain

1. (transitive) To hold inside.Examples: "The brown box contains three stacks of books."; "At half-past nine on this Saturday evening, the parlour of the Salutation Inn, High Holborn, contained most of its customary visitors. […] In former days every tavern of repute kept such a room for its own select circle, a club, or society, of habitués, who met every evening, for a pipe and a cheerful glass."; "[The researchers] noticed many of their pieces of [plastic marine] debris sported surface pits around two microns across. Such pits are about the size of a bacterial cell. Closer examination showed that some of these pits did, indeed, contain bacteria,[…]."Synonyms: enclose, inholdtransitive

2. (transitive) To include as a part.Examples: "Most of the meals they offer contain meat."; "Manganism has been known about since the 19th century, when miners exposed to ores containing manganese, a silvery metal, began to totter, slur their speech and behave like someone inebriated."Synonyms: comprise, embody, incorporate, inholdtransitive

3. (transitive) To put constraints upon; to restrain; to confine; to keep within bounds.Examples: "I'm so excited, I can hardly contain myself!"; "Fear not, my lord: we can contain ourselves."; "[The king's] only Person is oftentimes instead of an Army, to contain the unruly People from a thousand evil Occasions."Synonyms: controltransitive

4. (mathematics, of a set etc., transitive) To have as an element or subset.Examples: "A group contains a unique inverse for each of its elements."; "If that subgraph contains the vertex in question then it must be spanning."transitive

5. (obsolete, intransitive) To restrain desire; to live in continence or chastity.Examples: "But if they cannot contain, let them marry."intransitiveobsolete