reject

Formsrejects, rejecting, rejected

Pluralrejects

1. 1
   verbtransitive

   To refuse to accept something that is offered, proposed, or claimed.

   Editors often reject manuscripts that fail to follow submission guidelines.

   The committee rejected the proposal after a long debate.

   Similarrefuse, decline, dismiss, veto, spurn

   Oppositeaccept, approve

   Note

   The core sense, and its Latin image is physical: re- 'back' plus iacere 'to throw', so to reject something is to throw it back at whoever offered it. The borrowing pushed out Old English āweorpan, 'to throw out'. It pairs naturally with offers, proposals and claims. In the American novelist Winston Churchill's The Celebrity (1897), the narrator takes refuge on the inn steps after rejecting offers from the Celebrity to join him in amusements.

2. 2
   verbtransitive

   To turn down another person's romantic interest or advances.

   Most people fear that the person they love will reject them.

   She rejected him kindly but firmly after the dance.

   Similarrebuff, spurn

   Oppositeaccept

   Note

   Personal refusal shows up most often in the passive, with the person who was turned down as the subject: I've been rejected, when you're rejected. The advance itself usually goes unnamed, so the sentence is about the experience of being refused. In the active, the object is a person, as in she rejected him. That sets it apart from the general sense, whose object is an offer or idea.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   An item that has been turned down or discarded for failing to meet requirements.

   The factory store sells rejects at half price.

   That mug was a reject, so I got it cheap.

   Similarsecond, discard

   Note

   The general noun covers anything turned down, and technical writing likes to pair it with its opposite. Jim Blinn's Corner (1996) sorts line segments in a graphics pipeline into trivial accepts and trivial rejects, the easy cases that can be kept or thrown out at once. Noticing that pairing with accept is useful. The narrower manufacturing use belongs to the factory sense.

4. 4
   nouncolloquialcountable

   A defective product pulled from a production line and kept from being sold.

   Quality control marks each reject before it leaves the floor.

   The rejects from this batch all had cracked seals.

   Similardud

   Note

   Placed before another noun, the word becomes a label for seconds. Salman Rushdie's Fury (2001) lists 'the reject china' among the Manhattan street goods that fashion-hungry buyers far away would have killed for. That attributive use carries the word from the factory floor to the shop counter. On the line itself, the plain noun is the usual form: a reject, the rejects from this batch.

5. 5
   verbtransitive

   In basketball, to block an opponent's shot, especially so forcefully that the ball flies off the court.

   The center rose up to reject the shot at the buzzer.

   He rejected the dunk attempt so hard the ball landed in the third row.

   Similarblock

   Note

   Basketball takes the Latin 'throw back' literally. The defender does not just stop the shot but sends it away, ideally clear off the court. The object is the shot or the attempt, not the player: reject the shot, reject a dunk. The word carries an emphasis that plain block lacks, and it draws on the same throwing image as the everyday 'refuse' verb.

6. 6
   nounslangderogatorycountable

   An unpopular person whom others look down on or exclude from social circles.

   They treated the new student like a reject, ignoring him in the hallways.

   He spent years feeling like a reject before finding friends who understood him.

   Similaroutcast, misfit, loser, pariah

   Note

   An insult rather than a description. Slang and derogatory, it brands a person as something discarded, as if they had failed inspection like a defective product. It suits quoted speech or a character's voice better than neutral writing, and it is unkind to use about a real person. Phrasings such as 'treated like a reject' or 'felt like a reject' report the insult instead of delivering it.

7. 7
   nouncountable

   An aborted takeoff, halted by the flight crew before the aircraft becomes airborne.

   The captain initiated a reject after hearing an unusual noise during the roll.

   High-speed rejects put enormous strain on the brakes.

   Similarabort

   Note

   Aviation clips 'rejected takeoff' to a single noun, so crews speak of a reject or a high-speed reject. The crew discontinues the takeoff roll, typically before the takeoff decision speed, and brings the aircraft to a stop on the remaining runway. The noun keeps the technical word rejected, where everyday speech would say aborted.

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