task
Part of speech: noun
verb
Morphological type: simple
Topics: computing
engineering
mathematics
natural-sciences
physical-sciences
sciences
Etymology: From Middle English taske (“task, tax”), from Old Northern French tasque, (compare Old French variant tasche), from Medieval Latin tasca, alteration of taxa, from Latin taxō (“to censure; to charge”). Doublet of tax.
Inflected forms:
form: tasks
pos: noun
tags: plural
form: tasks
pos: verb
tags: present
singular
third-person
form: tasking
pos: verb
tags: participle
present
form: tasked
pos: verb
tags: participle
past
form: tasked
pos: verb
tags: past
Senses:
gloss: A piece of work done as part of one’s duties.
pos: noun
examples: daily task
monotonous task
regular task
parental task
The employee refused to complete the assignment, arguing that it was not one of the tasks listed in her job description.
gloss: Any piece of work done.
pos: noun
examples: carry out a task
complete a task
Irregular bedtimes may disrupt healthy brain development in young children, according to a study of intelligence and sleeping habits. ¶ Going to bed at a different time each night affected girls more than boys, but both fared worse on mental tasks than children who had a set bedtime, researchers found.
gloss: A single action undertaken by a given agent.
pos: noun
examples: [T]here is a well-defined run in which the stages of Atalanta’s run are punctuated by finite rests, arguably showing the possibility of completing an infinite series of finite tasks in a finite time
gloss: A difficult or tedious undertaking.
pos: noun
examples: As the world's drug habit shows, governments are failing in their quest to monitor every London window-box and Andean hillside for banned plants. But even that Sisyphean task looks easy next to the fight against synthetic drugs. No sooner has a drug been blacklisted than chemists adjust their recipe and start churning out a subtly different one.
gloss: An objective.
pos: noun
gloss: A process or execution of a program.
pos: noun
examples: The user killed the frozen task.
gloss: A tax or charge.
pos: noun
tags: obsolete
examples: Art thou the Collector of the Kings taske? […] Thou haſt thy taske money for all that be heere, […]
gloss: To assign a task to, or impose a task on.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: On my first day in the office, I was tasked with sorting a pile of invoices.
All hail, great master! grave sir, hail! I come / To answer thy best pleasure; be't to fly, / To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride / On the curl'd clouds, to thy strong bidding task / Ariel and all his quality.
There task thy maids, and exercise the loom.
By 1966 the building was considered so unsafe that the Royal Engineers were tasked with demolishing it.
gloss: To oppress with severe or excessive burdens; to tax
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it.
gloss: To charge, as with a fault.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: Too impudent to task me with those errors.
Synonyms: chore
job
objective
goal
Derived words: attask
call to task
eigentask
hypertask
intertask
intratask
metatask
microtask
monotask
multitasking
on task
outtask
overtask
pretask
retask
Sally-Anne task
Sternberg task
subtask
supertask
take to task
taskable
taskbar
taskboard
task control
tasker
task failed successfully
task force
task-force
task group
taskless
tasklet
tasklike
tasklist
task manager
taskmaster
taskmistress
task-negative
task-oriented
taskpad
task-positive
taskscape
taskset
tasksetter
tasksetting
tasksheet
task-specific
tasktray
taskwork
tasky
utility task vehicle
multitask
multi-task
Translations: