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authorize

verbattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈɔːθəɹaɪz//
  • United States//ˈɔθəɹaɪz//
  • United States//ˈɑθəɹaɪz//
  • Canada//ˈɒθəɹaɪz//
  • Canada//ˈɑθəɹaɪz//

To grant (someone) the permission or power necessary to do (something); to permit; to sanction or consent to.

verb

  1. 1

    To grant (someone) the permission or power necessary to do (something); to permit; to sanction or consent to.

    The General Assembly authorized the Council to take up the matter.

    The judge authorized the wiretapping.

    The term “Alfredian” then is not univocal; it can mean, depending on the argument, anything from Alfred setting down words by himself, to Alfred working with a little or a lot of help in writing or dictating, or to Alfred authorizing another or others to act in his name with degrees of his personal involvement varying from much to nil.

    Meese arrived back at the Justice Department at 12:45 p.m. and advised Reynolds, Cooper, and Richardson that the President had authorized him to "get his arms around the Iranian initiative."

Etymology

From Middle English auctorisen, from Old French auctorisier, from Medieval Latin auctōrizāre, from Latin auctor. See author about the orthography with ⟨h⟩. Doublet of octroy.

Forms

past tense
authorized
past participle
authorized
present participle
authorizing
third person singular
authorizes
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).