0 past simple and past participle of wrest
1 to get something with effort or difficulty:
At university campuses, communists stepped up their criticism of capitalist development and wrested control of student and faculty unions.
First, formal politics expanded as the state assumed new f unctions and wrested control of tasks from institutions that were previously independent of the state.
Workers wrested a lot of power from owners and won real concessions in the workplace.
Their prominence in working groups enabled police representatives to frustrate agreement and important concessions were wrested from government.
In very difficult personal circumstances, disabled people have wrested control from professionals, at least in limited ways.
In 1912, the department wrested control of parcel post delivery from the nation's express companies, rendering them obsolete in the parcel market in under a decade.
In addition, agricultural cooperatives and ministry bureaucrats wrested control over the regulation of key farm inputs such as petroleum and fertilizers away from business interests and their allies in government.
The great transforming force in modern human history has been a voracious capitalism, which, for example, has invaded the family and wrested from it its traditional socializing functions.
