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reception

nouncommon in dialogue

  • //ɹɪˈsɛp.ʃn̩//

The act of receiving.

noun

  1. 1

    The act of receiving.

  2. 2

    The act or ability to receive radio or similar signals.

    We have poor TV reception in the valley.

    The new system provides exceptional quality of the reception signal.

  3. 3

    A social engagement, usually to formally welcome someone.

    After the wedding we proceeded to the reception.

    "There was warmth, but there was also trepidation," said the head of one gay group, who attended the reception.

  4. 4

    A reaction; the treatment received on first talking to a person, arriving at a place, etc.

    The ambassador's jokes met a cold reception.

    At the end of a week, she could bear the suspense no longer, and so went humbly to her old home and sought forgiveness. She was not repulsed, but her reception was cold; and this hurt her almost as badly.

    The crusty portier and the crusty clerks gave us the surly reception which their kind deal out in prosperous times, but by mollifying them with an extra display of obsequiousness and servility we finally got them to show us to the room which our boy had engaged for us.

    Former Tottenham star Rohan Ricketts came off the Rovers bench with 19 minutes to go to a warm reception from the home fans, six years after leaving the Lane.

  5. 5

    The desk of a hotel or office where guests are received.

    The reception of the hotel is on the second floor; exit the lift and turn right.

  6. 6

    The school year, or part thereof, between preschool and Year 1, when children are introduced to formal education.

  7. 7

    The conscious adoption or transplantation of legal phenomena from a different culture.

    Among the numerous receptions of Roman law one event stood out, to the extent that, at least in central Europe, it almost monopolized the term.

  8. 8

    The act of catching a pass.

    Henderson can play multiple techniques, man and off, and over the last two seasons, he yielded just 20 receptions, on 44 targets, in single coverage on the boundary, according to Pro Football Focus, making him a prime candidate to start there as a rookie.

  9. 9

    Reading viewed as the active process of receiving a text in any medium (written, spoken, signed, multimodal, nonverbal), consisting of several steps, such as ideation, comprehension, reconstruction, interpretation.

Etymology

From Middle English recepcion, reception, from Middle French reception, from Latin receptiōn- (“the act of receiving; reception”), from recipiō (“receive”), from re- (“back”) + capiō (“to hold”). Equivalent to receive + -tion.

Forms

plural
receptions
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).