(v. t.) To wrest from an unwilling person by physical force, menace, duress, torture, or any undue or illegal exercise of power or ingenuity; to wrench away (from); to tear away; to wring (from); to exact; as, to extort contributions from the vanquished; to extort confessions of guilt; to extort a promise; to extort payment of a debt.
(v. t.) To get by the offense of extortion. See Extortion, 2.
(v. i.) To practice extortion.
(p. p. & a.) Extorted.
Example Sentences:
(1) But with a civil war raging and no one to protect them, most migrants are at risk of kidnap, extortion and forced labour.
(2) As the gangs fragmented, many increasingly focused on extortion, kidnapping and human trafficking.
(3) The prize catch was his sister, Patrizia Messina Denaro, 43, accused of running the effort to channel extorted cash to fuel her brother's life on the run.
(4) And with the cartels come other nightmares: kidnapping, extortion, contract killers and people trafficking.
(5) "There are no social programmes or prevention projects and, OK, there are fewer murders, but delinquency, extortion and kidnappings are up.
(6) The government will need to continue with extra-judicial killings, commonly called crossfire, until terrorist activities and extortion are uprooted."
(7) They prey on the population, kidnapping and extorting in cahoots with criminal gangs, according to multiple complaints filed to the human rights commission.
(8) Mexican drug cartels have been waging an increasingly bloody war to control smuggling routes, the local drug market and extortion rackets, including shakedowns of migrants seeking to reach the United States.
(9) The official, who refused to be quoted by name, said Barankov was accused of summoning random people to his office, telling them they were being investigated and extorting bribes to close non-existent cases.
(10) But they are also brutal killers and methamphetamine dealers who extort everyone from big corporations to street vendors throughout Michoácan, according to residents and government officials.
(11) The latest film sees Bond travel from Mexico to the Sahara desert, Italy and the Austrian Alps in pursuit of SPECTRE – an acronym for Special Executive for Counter-Intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion – the sinister organisation intent on world domination.
(12) Sumo wrestling , already suffering a tarnished reputation, is facing its greatest scandal in years amid revelations of extortion, illegal gambling and ties with the criminal underworld.
(13) Despite an increase in police crackdowns, yakuza membership is steadily rising amid richer pickings from extortion, prostitution, drug smuggling, property deals and even stock market deals as Japan's economy emerges from its "lost decade" of recession.
(14) Officials from the defence ministry, run by Rajapaksa's brother, Gotabhaya, have said many of the abductions since the end of the conflict were of "underworld characters involved in organised crime, drug trade, extortion, kidnapping and such antisocial activities".
(15) Meanwhile, at the top of the tree, managers of the maquiladoras – faced with recession and competition from Asia – needed fewer workers, spewing their surplus humanity (which flocked here from all over Mexico) into the new narco-economy of "opportunities" for murder, extortion and kidnapping.
(16) He told the New York Times : "How is this not extortion?
(17) "From what I know of the Nigerian police, they look for every opportunity to extort money.
(18) With time, the focus of Shaltai-Boltai’s activities shifted from political statement to straight extortion.
(19) Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, warned in May last year that it risked simply creating better-trained criminals – or police who "would be able to extort more effectively".
(20) It said that some of the information that formed the basis of the allegations against it “has been gathered as a result of criminal activity including extortion”.
Wrest
Definition:
(v. t.) To turn; to twist; esp., to twist or extort by violence; to pull of force away by, or as if by, violent wringing or twisting.
(v. t.) To turn from truth; to twist from its natural or proper use or meaning by violence; to pervert; to distort.
(v. t.) To tune with a wrest, or key.
(n.) The act of wresting; a wrench; a violent twist; hence, distortion; perversion.
(n.) Active or moving power.
(n.) A key to tune a stringed instrument of music.
(n.) A partition in a water wheel, by which the form of the buckets is determined.
Example Sentences:
(1) Security forces have also tried to wrest back the Sunni stronghold of Tikrit from a loose alliance of Isis fighters, other jihadist groups and former Saddam Hussein loyalists.
(2) Residents of five blocks in Nottingham, called City Heights, set off fireworks to celebrate wresting control of their development from Peverel after a long legal battle.
(3) A long campaign to wrest control of the parliamentary agenda from government triumphed today when MPs voted overwhelmingly to establish an elected backbench committee to take responsibility for tracts of Commons business.
(4) The truce was short-lived, and by the following February, hundreds of Taliban fighters had recaptured the area, prompting the British, aided by the US Army's 82nd airborne division, to conduct a massive operation in late 2007 to wrest back control of the district centre.
(5) Their composure was shattered from the moment Alex McCarthy gifted the visitors an equaliser, all authority wrested away in the blink of an eye and Liverpool , suddenly focused where previously they had been limp and ineffective, the more persuasive threat in what time that remained.
(6) They must have thought they had wrested control of this contest having started the second half with such urgency, the excellent Sergio Agüero – "a powerful tank," according to Mourinho – darting behind Gary Cahill to collect Samir Nasri's pass and thump a glorious finish high beyond Petr Cech at his near post.
(7) 8 March 2008: Anwar leads an opposition coalition to wrest a third of parliament's seats and five states from the incumbent National Front coalition, which has ruled Malaysia since it became independent from Britain in 1957.
(8) Iraqi units, described by commanding general Lloyd Austin as the centerpiece of the war for the moment , are not ready to wrest Mosul or other significant territory from Isis .
(9) Iraq’s armed forces, backed by Shia militia, have begun a fresh campaign to wrest control and “liberate” Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit, now a stronghold of Islamic State (Isis), the country’s prime minister has said.
(10) The terminals were wrested from the control of Field Marshal Khalid Haftar, the head of the so-called Libyan National Army (LNA), a force that dominates in eastern Libya and enjoys Russian and Egyptian support.
(11) The forward bustled in, stealing the ball and holding off the centre-half as he attempted to wrest it back, before ripping a glorious shot from a horribly tight angle into the far top corner as Ben Foster edged out to smother.
(12) Najib's coalition hopes to win back a large number of parliamentary seats and several states that Anwar's opposition alliance wrested from it in 2008 elections.
(13) Take Tarlair Lido in Aberdeen, recently granted £300,000 for immediate repairs which makes its swimming future imaginable, or Brighton 's art deco Saltdean Lido , wrested by campaigners from a developer who was not, shall we say, "swimming friendly".
(14) Cameron and Gove are against this, because if London wrested more control of schools back to local government level, then other local authorities would clamour for the same thing.
(15) This is what the revolution is about: Ukrainians trying to wrest control of their country from the oligarchs of Donetsk, Dnepropetrovsk and elsewhere who – with help from east and west – have robbed them for 23 years.
(16) The raid represented an attempt by Macierewicz to wrest immediate control of the centre from Dusza, who had been appointed to run it by Poland’s former centre-right government ousted in October elections by the radical Law and Justice party.
(17) Good docs appear to wrest a degree of coherence from the contingent mess of life My life has been spoiled by docs.
(18) In front of a record crowd for a women’s final of 32,912 at Wembley, Carter’s 18th-minute goal was enough to wrest the trophy back from Chelsea Ladies, last year’s league and cup winners, who could have no complaints after coming up second best in almost every area of the pitch.
(19) The problem is not believed to be the paucity of sports rights that afflicted the programme during the 1990s as Sky attempted to wrest control of every big event from the BBC, but that viewers now see Grandstand as old-fashioned.
(20) It won't help the cause one jot to say this, but for those of us who came of age in the 1960s, here comes our final right to wrest from the old moral and religious orthodoxy: the right to die as we please.