territorial waters

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a maritime zone extending 12 nautical miles from a coastal state's baseline within which the state exercises full sovereignty — subject only to the right of innocent passage for foreign ships — and by extension an idiom for any domain over which a person, organisation, or entity asserts strong proprietary control and whose boundaries they expect others to respect; to enter someone's territorial waters is to move into a space they regard as their own, where their rules apply and where visitors are tolerated only on sufferance and under conditions set by the sovereign; the phrase captures the way in which the formal legal framework of maritime sovereignty translates into the informal social dynamics of boundary and ownership, in which individuals and organisations delineate the domains in which they claim authority and resist intrusion, whether in professional life — areas of expertise, organisational turf — or in personal relationships and psychological boundaries