From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishprecinctpre‧cinct /ˈpriːsɪŋkt/ noun 1 → shopping/pedestrian precinct2 [countable] American EnglishPG one of the areas that a town or city is divided into, so that elections or police work can be organized more easily3 [countable] American EnglishSCP the main police station in a particular area of a town or city4 → precincts
Examples from the Corpus
precinct• the 12th Precinct• The suspect was taken to the 40th precinct in South Bronx.• Safely over the other side of the gate and out of the farm precincts, he ran up the hill towards the quarry.• the fourteenth precinct• The mayor has lost support in many precincts of the city.• With 99 percent of precincts reporting, Fordice had 359,884 votes.• I think they should make the whole area a pedestrian precinct.• The cloth marks a threshold, the boundary between the outside and the inside of a temporarily sacred precinct.• James was found dead beside a railway line in Liverpool after disappearing from a shopping precinct in Bootle last month.• The two-year-old disappeared 11 days ago from Bootle's Strand shopping precinct.• They wandered around the shopping precinct for an hour while Suzie was having her hair cut.• Some precinct captains have had more jobs than they can remember.• Buchanan also called on independents and Democrats to flood the precinct meetings Monday night.• They've got a lovely new Burton's open in the precinct now.• Service and favors, the staples of the precinct captain and his ward boss.• All our needs were, as much as possible, attended to within the precincts of the town itself.From Longman Business Dictionaryprecinctpre‧cinct /ˈpriːsɪŋkt/ noun [countable]1British English an area of a city with many different shops, where cars are not allowedThe hotel is within five minutes of the main shopping precinct.2American English an area in a city with its own local government, police force etcworking-class black precinctsOrigin precinct (1400-1500) Medieval Latin praecinctum, from Latin praecingere “to put a belt around” 