different between allowance vs assignment

English

Alternative forms

• allowaunce (obsolete)

Etymology

Borrowed from Old French alouance.

Morphologically allow +? -ance.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /??la??ns/

Noun

allowance (countable and uncountable, plural allowances)

1. permission; granting, conceding, or admitting
2. Acknowledgment.
3. That which is allowed; a share or portion allotted or granted; a sum granted as a reimbursement, a bounty, or as appropriate for any purpose; a stated quantity.
   • 1848, William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair

     Some persons averred that Sir Pitt Crawley gave his brother a handsome allowance.

4. Abatement; deduction; the taking into account of mitigating circumstances
   • 1848, Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James II

     After making the largest allowance for fraud.

5. (commerce) A customary deduction from the gross weight of goods, differing by country.

6. (horse racing) A permitted reduction in the weight that a racehorse must carry.

   Antonym: penalty

7. A child's allowance; pocket money.

8. (minting) A permissible deviation in the fineness and weight of coins, owing to the difficulty in securing exact conformity to the standard prescribed by law.
9. (obsolete) approval; approbation

   (Can we find and add a quotation of Crabbe to this entry?)

10. (obsolete) license; indulgence
    • 1695, John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity

      this Allowance for their Transgressions

Synonyms

• (act of allowing): authorization, permission, sanction, tolerance.
• (money): stipend
• (minting): remedy, tolerance

Derived terms

Translations

Verb

allowance (third-person singular simple present allowances, present participle allowancing, simple past and past participle allowanced)

1. (transitive) To put upon a fixed allowance (especially of provisions and drink).

2. (transitive) To supply in a fixed and limited quantity.

English

Etymology

From Middle English assignement, from Old French assignement.

Pronunciation

Noun

assignment (countable and uncountable, plural assignments)

1. The act of assigning; the allocation of a job or a set of tasks.

   This flow chart represents the assignment of tasks in our committee.

2. The categorization of something as belonging to a specific category.

   We should not condone the assignment of asylum seekers to that of people smugglers.

3. An assigned task.

   The assignment the department gave him proved to be quite challenging.

4. A position to which someone is assigned.

   Unbeknownst to Mr Smith, his new assignment was in fact a demotion.

5. (education) A task given to students, such as homework or coursework.

   Mrs Smith gave out our assignments, and said we had to finish them by Monday.

6. (law) A transfer of a right or benefit from one person to another.

   The assignment of the lease has not been finalised yet.

7. (law) A document that effects this transfer.

   Once you receive the assignment in the post, be sure to sign it and send it back as soon as possible.

8. (programming) An operation that assigns a value to a variable.

Hyponyms

• (programming): augmented assignment

Translations

References

• assignment on Wikipedia.Wikipedia