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adoption

nouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//əˈdɒp.ʃən//
  • United States//əˈdɑp.ʃən//

The act of adopting.

noun

  1. 1

    The act of adopting.

    The project also included seeking the adoption of homosexuals as prisoners of conscience by Amnesty International, which would mean simply adding 'sexual orientation' to Article 1A of the Amnesty International mandate.

  2. 2

    The state of being adopted; the acceptance of a child of other parents as if they were one's own child.

    A Chinese baby girl was given away for adoption.

    Another Chinese boy was put up for adoption.

    “The story of this adoption is, of course, the pivot round which all the circumstances of the mysterious tragedy revolved. Mrs. Yule had an only son, namely, William, to whom she was passionately attached ; but, like many a fond mother, she had the desire of mapping out that son's future entirely according to her own ideas.[…]”

  3. 3

    An admission to an institution, for example a hospital, clinic, mental asylum.

    the adoption of people into hospitals or monasteries

  4. 4

    The choosing and making that to be one's own which originally was not so; acceptance.

    the adoption of opinions

    the adoption of words from another language

  5. 5

    The choosing and making that to be one's own which originally was not so; acceptance. The act of accepting and putting into effect or practice (a method, proposal, technique, etc.)

    Our company is considering the adoption of a four-day week.

  6. 6

    The transfer from an old system to another (usually better) system.

  7. 7

    An act of divine grace by which the redeemed in Christ are admitted to the privileges of the sons of God.

  8. 8

    slangTen consecutive wins against an opponent.

    Infuriated by his adoption yesterday, the chess master has resolved to study twice as long and twice as hard.

    Can Rensch break the string of adoptions and finally find vindication by thwarting Nepomniachtchi with the pressure on?

    10-0 would have meant "adoption," but that didn't happen as Fedoseev held the 10th game to a draw. After another loss and another draw, he finally managed to score his first win in game 13.

    Despite modestly highlighting her "adoption" today, the chess that Sachdev played was not reflected on the scoreboard and rather, was an example of Rosen's superior time management overall.

Etymology

Borrowed from French adoption, from Latin adoptio, allied to adoptare (“to adopt”). Equivalent to adopt + -ion.

Forms

plural
adoptions
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).