assignment
Pluralassignments
- 1
- 2A task that a teacher gives to students, such as homework or coursework.
Students must submit the assignment by Friday at midnight.
Her history assignment required nearly two weeks of research.
Similarhomework, task, project, coursework
Note
The classroom has its own kind of task: a piece of work an instructor sets, to be finished within a fixed period and used to assess or reinforce what was taught. Teachers give out or set assignments, and students complete, submit or hand them in against a deadline. The subject often comes first, as in a history assignment, which separates it from a task at work.
- 3The act of assigning, or the handing out of a job or set of tasks.
The manager oversaw the assignment of cases to each lawyer.
Random assignment of participants helps reduce bias in experiments.
Similarallocation, allotment, distribution, delegation
Note
The noun the rest of the family grows from comes from Middle English assignement, from Old French assignement, and it is plainly assign plus -ment. Like many -ment nouns, it can name both the act and its result, so it also covers an assigned task. Its usual frame is assignment of something to someone: of cases to lawyers, of tasks within a committee.
- 4A post or position that someone is sent to take up.
The diplomat's latest assignment placed her in Geneva.
After training, each officer awaited a field assignment.
Similarposting, post, position, appointment, placement
- 5The transfer of a legal right or benefit from one party to another.
The contract permitted the assignment of payment rights to a third party.
Creditors challenged the assignment of the debtor's outstanding claims.
Similartransfer, conveyance
Note
Law uses the word for handing a right on. The party who holds a contractual or property right, the assignor, transfers it to another, the assignee, who then holds the legal interest. Leases, payment rights and outstanding claims are typical things to assign. The same word also names the paper that carries out the transfer, the transfer document.
- 6A document that carries out the transfer of a right or benefit from one party to another.
Both parties executed the assignment before a notary.
The recorded assignment proved who held the rights.
Similarconveyance
Note
Here the word moves from the deed to the paper: the written instrument that gives the legal transfer its effect, recording the parties and the interest conveyed. It is something you sign and return, or that the parties execute before a notary. Once recorded, it stands as proof of who holds the rights.
- 7In computer programming, an operation that sets a variable to hold a particular value.
Each assignment updates the variable with a new result.
The compiler flagged an assignment to an undeclared variable.
Note
Programming borrows the word for one of the core acts a program performs: storing a value in a variable, binding a named location to the result of evaluating an expression. It is usually written with an assignment operator such as the equals sign. The usual construction is assignment to a variable, and a compiler will flag an assignment to a variable that was never declared.
- 8The act of placing something into the category it belongs to.
The assignment of species to families relies on shared physical traits.
Errors in the assignment of costs to departments skewed the budget.
Similarclassification, categorization, allocation, attribution
- 9The act of categorizing a person as belonging to the male or female sex, typically done at birth.
Her sex assignment at birth was recorded as female.
The assignment of sex appears on the original birth record.
Note
A specialized use of the general act of categorizing, applied to a person's sex. It is usually made at birth on the basis of observed anatomy and then recorded on official documents. Careful usage keeps it distinct from gender identity: an assignment is a label someone else gives, not a person's own sense of self. It typically appears in the phrases sex assignment and assignment at birth.
Practice
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Origin
From Middle English assignement, borrowed from Old French assignement; it can also be analyzed as 'assign' plus the suffix '-ment'.