appropriate
Language: English
Part of speech: verb
Pronunciation: ipa: /əˈpɹəʊ.pɹi.eɪt/
ipa: /əˈpɹoʊ.pɹi.eɪt/
note: Indic
ipa: /əˈpɾɔpɾɪeʈ/
Forms: form: appropriates
form: appropriating
form: appropriated
form: appropriated
Etymology: From Middle English appropriaten, from appropriat (“appropriated”) + -en, borrowed from Latin appropriātus, perfect passive participle of appropriō (“to make one's own”), from ad (“to”) + propriō (“to make one's own”), from proprius (“one's own, private”) + -ō (first conjugation verb-forming suffix).
Senses: examples: text: Let no man appropriate the use of a common benefit.
text: "I promise you," said she, after a pause of some minutes, "to wear the last new dress you gave me, it is a triumph of taste!"
Lord Marchmont bowed, and appropriated the compliment as if the taste had been his own, not the milliner's.
ref: 1837, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], “Prudence in Politics”, in Ethel Churchill: Or, The Two Brides. […], volume II, London: Henry Colburn, […], →OCLC, page 179:
text: We made an odd party before the arrival of the Ten, particularly when the Celebrity dropped in for lunch or dinner. He could not be induced to remain permanently at Mohair because Miss Trevor was at Asquith, but he appropriated a Hempstead cart from the Mohair stables and made the trip sometimes twice in a day.
ref: 1897 December (indicated as 1898), Winston Churchill, chapter V, in The Celebrity: An Episode, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., →OCLC:
text: On the morning after the one-day strike, October 4, one of the Type 4s on crew-training, No. D169, was appropriated to head the 3 a.m. mail to Hull, as no steam locomotive had been lit up and the usual Hull Type 3 was not available; [...].
ref: 1962 December, “Motive Power Miscellany: North Eastern Region”, in Modern Railways, pages 422, 425:
text: Loitering, panhandling, soliciting prostitution, graffiti writing―these activities [are claimed to] foster serious criminality. As a result, disorder in itself has become a harm that justifies the criminal sanction. By appropriating harm in this way, the order-maintenance approach to criminal justice has disarmed the traditional progressive 1960s response of "no harm."
ref: 2001, Bernard E. Harcourt, Illusion of Order:
glosses: To take to oneself; to claim or use, especially as by an exclusive right.
examples: text: A spot of ground is appropriated for a garden.
text: to appropriate money for the increase of the navy
text: 2012, The Washington Post, David Nakamura and Tom Hamburger, "Put armed police in every school, NRA urges"
"I call on Congress today to act immediately to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every single school in this nation," LaPierre said.
glosses: To set apart for, or assign to, a particular person or use, especially in exclusion of all others; with to or for.
examples: text: Some [benefices] were appropriated to secular ecclesiastical corporations
ref: 176, William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, book, Oxford, Oxfordshire: […] Clarendon Press, →OCLC:
topics: ecclesiastical
law
lifestyle
religion
glosses: To annex (for example a benefice, to a spiritual corporation, as its property).
examples: text: Under the towers were a number of gloomy subterraneous apartments with vaulted roofs, the use of which imagination was left to guess, and could only appropriate to punishment and horror.
ref: 1790, Helen Maria Williams, Julia, Routledge, published 2016, page 67:
text: Were we to take a portion of the skin, and contemplate its exquisite sensibility, so finely appropriated […] we should have no occasion to draw our argument, for the twentieth time, from the structure of the eye or the ear.
ref: 1802, William Paley, Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity:
text: The fellow across the road gives up farming and turns his place into a pastoral bootleggery . Picnickers appropriate the lawn and declare for the proletariat . The sheriff comes , argues with them and they depart , leaving the Sunday [...]
ref: 1927, Plain Talk, page 94:
glosses: To make suitable to; to suit.
Synonyms: sense: to take to oneself
word: help oneself
word: impropriate
word: take
word: steal
sense: to set apart for
word: allocate
word: earmark
word: set apart
Derived terms: appropriater
appropriative
appropriator
disappropriate
malappropriate
misappropriate
reappropriate
unappropriate