duress

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun Compulsion by threat or violence; coercion.
• noun Constraint or difficulty caused by misfortune.
• noun A fraud achieved through the use of a threat or compulsion.
• noun A criminal defense for an act undertaken under threat of serious bodily harm.
• noun Forcible confinement.

from The Century Dictionary.

• To subject to duress or restraint; imprison.
• noun Hardness.
• noun Hardship; constraint; pressure; imprisonment; restraint of liberty; durance.
• noun In law, actual or apprehended physical restraint so great as to amount to coercion: a species of fraud in which compulsion in some form takes the place of deception in accomplishing the injury.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• transitive verb To subject to duress.
• noun Hardship; constraint; pressure; imprisonment; restraint of liberty.
• noun (Law) The state of compulsion or necessity in which a person is influenced, whether by the unlawful restrain of his liberty or by actual or threatened physical violence, to incur a civil liability or to commit an offense.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun obsolete Harsh treatment.
• noun Constraint by threat.
• verb To put under duress; to pressure.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun compulsory force or threat