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resign

verbverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ɹɪˈzaɪn//
  • //ɹiːˈsaɪn//

To give up; to relinquish ownership of.

verb

  1. 1

    To give up; to relinquish ownership of.

    And if the perfection of well-speaking might bring any glorie sutable unto a great personage, Scipio and Lelius would never have resigned the honour of their Comedies[…]unto an Affrican servant[…].

  2. 2

    To hand over (something to someone), place into the care or control of another.

  3. 3

    To voluntarily leave (a job or position), in particular a hard-fought position of high status.

    I am resigning in protest of the unfair treatment of our employees.

    He resigned the crown to follow his heart.

  4. 4

    To submit passively; to give up as hopeless or inevitable.

    He had no choice but to resign the game and let his opponent become the champion.

    Here is a man who was resigned to his fate, who was walking to the scaffold and about to die like a coward, that's true, but at least he was about to die without resisting and without recrimination. Do you know what gave him that much strength? Do you know what consoled him? Do you know what resigned him to his fate?

Etymology

From Anglo-Norman resigner, Middle French resigner, and its source, Latin resignāre (“to unseal, annul, assign, resign”), from re- + signāre (“to seal, stamp”). Piecewise doublet of re-sign.

verb

  1. 1

    Variant of re-signAlternative spelling of re-sign.

    Lastly, a note that I have resigned my GPG key to extend the expiration date.

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Italic *wre- Latin re-der. Old French re-bor. Middle English re- English re- English sign English resign From re- + sign.

Forms

past tense
resigned
past participle
resigned
present participle
resigning
third person singular
resigns
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).