# delegation

Pronunciation: US say "del-uh-GAY-shuhn" /ˌdɛləˈɡeɪʃən/; UK say "del-i-GAY-shuhn" /dɛlɪˈɡeɪʃən/

## Noun

1. A group of delegates sent to represent a larger body or organization.
   - Simple: A group of people chosen to speak or act for others.
   - _The trade delegation spent a week negotiating new export terms._
   - _A delegation from the union presented their demands to management._
2. The act of assigning a task, duty, or authority to another person to carry out.
   - Simple: The act of giving a task or power to someone else to handle.
   - _Effective delegation requires trusting your team to make their own decisions._
   - _His poor delegation meant he worked late every night on tasks others could have handled._
3. The transfer of the duty to perform an obligation from the original debtor to another party, who takes on its performance.
   - Simple: When someone who owes a duty passes the job of doing it to another person.
   - _The court held that delegation of the performance did not release the debtor from liability._
   - _By delegation, the contractor transferred its obligation to finish the building to another firm._
4. A method-dispatching technique that defines how lookup and inheritance work for self-referential calls between objects.
   - Simple: A way for one object to handle a task by passing it to another object.
   - _Prototype-based languages rely on delegation rather than class inheritance to reuse behavior._
   - _The framework uses delegation so that an unhandled method call falls through to a backing object._

## Origin

Borrowed from Latin 'dēlēgātiō' (genitive 'dēlēgātiōnis'), from the verb 'dēlēgō'; compare French 'délégation'.

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/delegation (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).