accomplishment
Pluralaccomplishments
- 1A thing that has been done successfully; an achievement reached through effort.
Landing the contract was considered a major accomplishment by the whole team.
Among her scientific accomplishments, the vaccine breakthrough is the most celebrated.
Similarachievement, feat, success, triumph
Oppositefailure
- 2The act of accomplishing something; the completion or fulfillment of a task or goal.
The accomplishment of such a difficult mission required years of careful planning.
Completion of the treaty marked the accomplishment of decades of diplomacy.
Similarcompletion, achievement, fulfillment, realization
Note
The sense closest to the verb: accomplish plus -ment, in English since the early 15th century and borrowed from French accomplissement, from accomplir. It names the carrying-out itself rather than the thing achieved, so it usually takes an of-phrase naming what was carried through: the accomplishment of an enterprise, of a prophecy. When the finished result is meant, the "achievement" meaning takes over.
- 3A refined skill or polished quality (such as music, drawing, or graceful manners) acquired through education or training.
He regarded fluent French as the mark of a cultivated accomplishment.
A genteel education aimed to give young women accomplishments like music and embroidery.
Similarskill, talent, attainment
Note
A later sense, arriving around 1600, built on the idea of what completes or equips a person. In the eighteenth century it named graces one could display. Charles Churchill's speaker in The Ghost (1763) promises to prove his "new accomplishment of dancing." The same sense could carry a moralist's suspicion: William Cowper, in The Progress of Error (1782), complained that accomplishments had taken virtue's place, and that wisdom was falling before exterior grace.
- 4The aspectual class of verbs or predicates that describe a process unfolding over time toward a natural, built-in endpoint, such as 'build a house' or 'draw a circle'.
Unlike an activity such as 'run', an accomplishment like 'paint a portrait' has a definite culmination.
Verbs classed as accomplishments take time to unfold yet entail a clear terminal point.
Note
Linguists use the word for one of Vendler's classes of lexical aspect. These events last over an interval and are telic, set apart from punctual achievements and from atelic activities and states. It often stands before another noun, as in "an accomplishment verb." Van Valin and LaPolla's Syntax (1997) describes children turning disappear into a causative accomplishment: "He disappeared it."
Practice
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Origin
First attested in the early 15th century, from accomplish + -ment, and borrowed from French accomplissement, from accomplir. The sense of completing, perfecting, or equipping is first attested around 1600.