reception

When it names the desk as a service, it usually drops the article: you sign in at reception or ask at reception. With the article it becomes a place in the building, as in "the reception is on the second floor." That bare form also keeps it apart from the welcoming party, which nearly always takes a or the.

Here reception is measured in temperature: a welcome is warm or cold. In T. S. Arthur's sketch of 1850, a woman who goes home to seek forgiveness "was not repulsed, but her reception was cold." In 2011 a former Tottenham player came off the bench "to a warm reception from the home fans." The usual verbs are meet and receive, and to a warm reception describes an arrival greeted that way.

To an engineer it covers the whole receiving end of a transmission: the antenna capturing the signal and the receiver recovering the original information from it. In everyday speech it is uncountable and judged by quality, so you have poor, good or exceptional TV reception. Say "we have bad reception," not "a bad reception," which drifts toward the "reaction" meaning.

The sense the others branch from, and the one closest to the Latin: receptiō meant "the act of receiving," from recipiō, "receive," built from re- "back" and capiō "I hold." English took it through Middle French and Middle English recepcion, and it works as receive plus -tion. It usually takes of, naming the thing taken in: the reception of the goods, the reception of a report.

A statistic as much as an action: a reception is credited only when an eligible receiver secures the ball while staying inbounds. Because it is counted, it is freely plural. Receivers pile up receptions, and defenders are judged by how few they allow. In 2020, Ken Belson and Ben Shpigel described a defender who "yielded just 20 receptions, on 44 targets."

In England and Wales it is the first year of primary school, for children aged four to five. It bridges early-years provision and the start of Key Stage 1 in Year 1. Like the names of other school years, it goes without an article: a child is in reception or starts reception, and the word works as a modifier too, as in reception teachers or a reception class.

Comparative lawyers reserve it for a deliberate act. One legal culture imports and assimilates another's rules or institutions, as distinct from slow organic borrowing or law imposed by conquest. It can be counted, since there have been many receptions of Roman law. Yet Ernst Levy wrote in 1942 that one such event, at least in central Europe, "almost monopolized the term."

Language teaching sets this term against production, meaning speaking, writing or signing. It insists that the receiving side is real work: the reader or listener forms a first idea of the message, understands it, rebuilds it and interprets it. Keep it apart from the "reaction" meaning. Here the reception of a poem is how it is processed, not how warmly it was greeted.