coerce: [17] The underlying etymological meaning of coerce is ‘restraining’ or ‘confining’. It comes from the Latin compound verb coercēre ‘constrain’, which was formed from the prefix co- ‘together’ and the verb arcēre ‘shut up, ward off’ (possibly a relative of Latin arca ‘chest, box’, from which English gets ark). An earlier, 15th-century, form of the English word was coherce, which came via Old French cohercier. => ark[coerce etymology, coerce origin, 英语词源]