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exception

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • //əkˈsɛpʃən//
  • //ɪkˈsɛpʃən//

The act of excepting or excluding; exclusion; restriction by taking out something which would otherwise be included, as in a class, statement, rule.

noun

  1. 1

    The act of excepting or excluding; exclusion; restriction by taking out something which would otherwise be included, as in a class, statement, rule.

    the exception of a rule

  2. 2

    That which is excluded from others; a person, thing, or case, specified as distinct, or not included.

    That rule is usually true, but there are a few exceptions.

    The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution had abolished slavery but allowed one major exception: slavery remained appropriate as punishment for a crime.

  3. 3

    An objection, on legal grounds; also, as in conveyancing, a clause by which the grantor excepts or reserves something before the right is transferred.

  4. 4

    An objection; cavil; dissent; disapprobation; offense; cause of offense.

  5. 5

    An interruption in normal processing, typically caused by an error condition, that can be raised (“thrown”) by one part of the program and handled (“caught”) by another part.

    null pointer exception

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *h₁éǵʰ Proto-Indo-European *-s Proto-Indo-European *h₁éǵʰs Proto-Italic *eks Latin ex Latin ex- substratebor.? Proto-Indo-European *kap- Proto-Indo-European *-yéti Proto-Indo-European *kapyéti Proto-Italic *kapjō Old Latin kapiō Latin capiō Latin excipiō Proto-Indo-European *-tis Proto-Indo-European *-Hō Proto-Indo-European *-tiHō Proto-Italic *-tiō Latin -tiō Latin exceptiōder. Old French excepcion Anglo-Norman excepciounbor. Middle English exception English exception From Middle English exception, excepcioun, from Anglo-Norman excepcioun, from Old French excepcion, from Latin exceptiō. Equivalent to except + -ion.

verb

  1. 1

    informalTo throw an exception.

Forms

plural
exceptions
past tense
exceptioned
past participle
exceptioned
present participle
exceptioning
third person singular
exceptions
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).