agreement
Pluralagreements
- 1An arrangement between two or more parties about what each will do, often a formal or legally binding one.
The breach of the agreement entitled the seller to sue for damages.
Both parties signed the agreement in the presence of their lawyers.
UsagePeople reach, sign or break an agreement; you make one with someone, on something or to do something.
Note
In law not every agreement is an enforceable contract; a contract is the kind a court will enforce. When a binding one is broken, the other party can seek remedies such as damages or specific performance. In legal drafting it works as a near-synonym of contract. An informal understanding between friends carries no such guarantee, so check whether a document is meant to bind before relying on it.
Checked 5 Nov 2026 · 3 facts
- Not every agreement is an enforceable contract; contractual enforceability requires additional conditions. london.ac.uk
- Damages and specific performance are remedies that an innocent party may seek for breach of contract; specific performance is discretionary. publications.parliament.uk
- An informal social understanding does not guarantee legal enforceability; intention to create legal relations matters. gov.uk
- 2A state in which several parties share the same view and do not contradict one another.
The committee reached agreement on the budget after a long debate.
Researchers are in broad agreement that the planet is warming.
UsageCommon frames: in agreement with someone, agreement on or about something, reach agreement.
Similarconsensus, accord, harmony, unanimity
Oppositedisagreement, dissent, discord
Note
Here nothing is promised; views simply line up, which separates it from the negotiated arrangement. When figures or results match rather than people, the word belongs to the matching sense, with no one consenting to anything.
- 3A grammatical rule by which some parts of a sentence change form to match attributes of other parts.
Many learners of French struggle with agreement, forgetting to make each adjective match its noun in gender and number.
Errors in subject-verb agreement are common in early writing.
Similarconcord
Note
The linguist's term, also called concord, describes one word taking its form from features of another: person, number, gender or case. Subject-verb agreement is the familiar English case (she walks, they walk). Andrew Radford's Transformational Grammar (1988) treats Agreement as an inflection in its own right, alongside Tense, and capitalizes both as the names of grammatical features.
Checked 5 Nov 2026 · 4 facts
- Agreement is also called concord and involves matching grammatical features, including person, number, gender or case. en.wikipedia.org
- English subject–verb agreement accounts for the contrast between 'she walks' and 'they walk'. yorku.ca
- Andrew Radford wrote Transformational Grammar: A First Course, first published in 1988. api.pageplace.de
- Radford treats Agreement alongside Tense as something for which finite I is inflected. en.wiktionary.org
- 4The condition of two or more things, such as figures, test results, or records, corresponding or fitting together without conflict.
The lab's measurements showed close agreement with the values the model had predicted.
Auditors were relieved to find exact agreement between the bank statements and the company's own ledger.
UsageUsually with with or between: close agreement with the predictions, agreement between two records.
Similarcorrespondence, consistency, concordance
Oppositediscrepancy, inconsistency
Less common meaning
- 5A quality of being pleasant, attractive, or agreeable.
Note
A lost meaning, now met only in older writing. Elegie XVII (1650), traditionally attributed to John Donne, praises features that "such agreements have": pleasing qualities, counted in the plural. A modern reader is likely to hear harmony or consent and misread the line. To praise charm today, use agreeableness or charms; this sense is obsolete and will not be understood in current writing.
Practice
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Origin
From Middle English agrement, from Old French agrement. It is a doublet of agrément, and is formed from agree plus the suffix -ment.
Checked 5 Nov 2026 · 4 facts
- Agreement comes from Middle English agrement. en.wiktionary.org
- Middle English agrement comes from Old French agrement. en.wiktionary.org
- Agreement is a doublet of agrément. en.wiktionary.org
- Agreement consists morphologically of agree and the suffix -ment. en.wiktionary.org