panopticon

[ pan-op-ti-kon ]

noun

1. a building, as a prison, hospital, library, or the like, so arranged that all parts of the interior are visible from a single point.

Word History and Origins

Origin of panopticon¹

1760–70; pan- + Greek optikón sight, seeing (neuter of optikós; optic )

Example Sentences

The group’s two-hour show delivers plenty of additional eye candy, not least a scene set to “In the City” in which you lift out of a kind of grimy tenement-building panopticon to soar over a verdant landscape rendered in almost-lurid greens and blues.

From Los Angeles Times

Ms. Stewart and her stylist, Tara Swennen, have taken the film’s carnality and covert politics and translated them for the promotional panopticon, forcing anybody watching to confront their own preconceptions about women’s bodies, their sexuality and exactly what empowerment means, while at the same time undermining the whole circus of branded celebrity dressing.

From New York Times

Ms. Stewart and her stylist, Tara Swennen, have taken the film’s carnality and covert politics and translated them for the promotional panopticon, forcing anybody watching to confront their own preconceptions about women’s bodies, their sexuality and exactly what empowerment means, while at the same time undermining the whole circus of branded celebrity dressing.

From New York Times

Letting defeat creep in when I see all of us getting stomped on by tech-enabled jackboots in an unregulated corporate panopticon.

From Salon

Yet its very existence also points to a way out of this panopticon.

From Slate