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reject

verbnouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ɹɪˈd͡ʒɛkt//
  • United States//ɹɪˈd͡ʒɛkt//
  • United States//ɹə-//
  • United States//ˈɹiːd͡ʒɛkt//
  • Australia//ɹəˈd͡ʒekt//
  • Australia//ˈɹiːd͡ʒekt//

To refuse to accept; to forswear.

verb

  1. 1

    To refuse to accept; to forswear.

    She even rejected my improved offer.

    One morning I had been driven to the precarious refuge afforded by the steps of the inn, after rejecting offers from the Celebrity to join him in a variety of amusements. But even here I was not free from interruption, for he was seated on a horse-block below me, playing with a fox terrier.

  2. 2

    To block a shot, especially if it sends the ball off the court.

  3. 3

    To refuse a romantic advance.

    I've been rejected three times this week.

    It's unexpected / It usually is / When you're rejected / Or you take a hit

Etymology

From Late Middle English rejecten, from Latin reiectus, past participle of reicere (“to throw back”), from re- (“back”) + iacere (“to throw”). Displaced native Old English āweorpan (literally “to throw out”).

noun

  1. 1

    Something that is rejected.

    Almost all line segments will be trivial accepts or trivial rejects, so the above covers the vast majority of cases.

  2. 2

    slangAn unpopular person.

  3. 3

    A rejected defective product in a production line.

    In all of India, China, Africa, and much of the southern American continent, those who had the leisure and wallet for fashion […] would have killed for the street merchandise of Manhattan, as also for […] the reject china and designer-label bargains to be found in downtown discount emporia.

  4. 4

    A rejected takeoff.

Forms

plural
rejects
past tense
rejected
past participle
rejected
present participle
rejecting
third person singular
rejects
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).