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Definition of assignment

task , duty , job , chore , stint , assignment mean a piece of work to be done.

task implies work imposed by a person in authority or an employer or by circumstance.

duty implies an obligation to perform or responsibility for performance.

job applies to a piece of work voluntarily performed; it may sometimes suggest difficulty or importance.

chore implies a minor routine activity necessary for maintaining a household or farm.

stint implies a carefully allotted or measured quantity of assigned work or service.

assignment implies a definite limited task assigned by one in authority.

Examples of assignment in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'assignment.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

see assign entry 1

14th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Phrases Containing assignment

• self - assignment

Dictionary Entries Near assignment

Cite this entry.

“Assignment.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/assignment. Accessed 16 May. 2024.

Legal Definition

Legal definition of assignment, more from merriam-webster on assignment.

Nglish: Translation of assignment for Spanish Speakers

Britannica English: Translation of assignment for Arabic Speakers

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• Meaning of assignment

assignment ( English)

Origin & history.

• 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.
• The categorization of something as belonging to a specific category.    We should not condone the assignment of asylum seekers to that of people smugglers.
• An assigned task .    The assignment the department gave him proved to be quite challenging.
• A position to which someone is assigned.    Unbeknownst to Mr Smith, his new assignment was in fact a demotion.
• ( 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.
• ( legal ) A transfer of something from one person to another, especially property , or a claim or right .    The assignment of the lease has not been finalised yet.
• ( legal ) 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.
• ( computing ) An operation that assigns a value to a variable .

▾  Further examples

In what was billed as Australia’s toughest assignment of AFC second round qualifying, given Jordan’s status as the Socceroos’ bogey side, for 45 minutes Australia appeared imperious. The Guardian, 14 November 2019

A school district in Texas has apologized after setting an assignment for 8th graders based on an offensive cartoon, likening police officers to slave masters and the KKK. Mail Online, 25 August 2020

A Black fourth-grader with autism was told to play the role of a slave during a school assignment in Tennessee, his parents said in a new lawsuit. MiamiHerald.com, 6 November 2020

The Seattle Mariners have designated Daniel Vogelbach for assignment barely a year after he was an All-Star selection. The Mariners made the move Wednesday before the start of a five-game homestand. The Washington Times, 20 August 2020

The future Hall of Famer faces a crucial Game 5 assignment pitching not just against the Rays but also his legacy of October struggles. ESPN, 25 October 2020

The woman with arguably the greatest story in Super Netball has been handed its toughest assignment as she attempts to lead the Sunshine Coast Lightning into a fourth consecutive grand final. news.com.au, 10 October 2020

The Indian women's hockey team's chief coach Sjoerd Marijne on Friday revealed that the bronze medal match against Great Britain in the ongoing Olympics was his last assignment with the side. The Times of India, 6 August 2021

▾  Dictionary entries

Entries where "assignment" occurs:

RAM : see also ram, Ram, rám, râm, Râm, rắm‎ RAM (English) Pronunciation computing: IPA: /ɹæm/ Rhymes: -lang Homophones: ram Noun RAM (pl. RAMs) (electronics, computing) Acronym of random access memory (project management) Responsibility…

complete : …simple past and past participle completed) (transitive) To finish; to make done; to reach the end.    He completed the assignment on time. (transitive) To make whole or entire.    The last chapter completes the book nicely. Usage This is…

ML : …be constructed. Examples of such languages are ALGOL 68 and PASCAL. Some authors designate the Curry systems as 'lambda calculi with type assignment ' and the Church systems as 'systems of typed lambda calculus'. (linguistics) Initialism of Medieval Latin…

idiom : …the most efficient or elegant means to achieve a particular result or behavior. ISBN 159059519X, page 100: "I have to use the same assignment and call to raw_input in two places. How can I avoid that? I can use the while True/break idiom:…

cover : …(intransitive) To act as a replacement.    I need to take off Tuesday. Can you cover for me?‎ (transitive) To have as an assignment or responsibility.    Can you cover the morning shift tomorrow? I'll give you off next Monday…

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Cite this page : "assignment" – WordSense Online Dictionary (16th May, 2024) URL: https://www.wordsense.eu/assignment/

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assignment operator (English)

assignment operators (English)

assignments (English)

assigno (Catalan)

assignons (French)

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Definition of assignment noun from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary

• Students are required to complete all homework assignments.
• You will need to complete three written assignments per semester.
• a business/special assignment
• I had set myself a tough assignment.
• on an assignment She is in Greece on an assignment for one of the Sunday newspapers.
• on assignment one of our reporters on assignment in China
• The students handed in their assignments.
• The teacher gave us an assignment on pollution.
• Why did you take on this assignment if you're so busy?
• He refused to accept the assignment.
• assignment on

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Definition of assignment – Learner’s Dictionary

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(Definition of assignment from the Cambridge Learner's Dictionary © Cambridge University Press)

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to discover why something does not work effectively and help to improve it

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Definition of 'assignment'

assignment in American English

Assignment in british english, examples of 'assignment' in a sentence assignment, related word partners assignment, trends of assignment.

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Related terms of assignment

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Assignment  (English) Translated to Malay as tugasan

Assignment in more languages.

• in Cebuano assignment
• in Filipino pagtatalaga
• in Indonesian tugas
• in Javanese tugas
• in Maori mahi
• in Hawaiian hana
• in Malagasy andraikitra
• in Samoan tofiga
• in Sundanese tugas

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Listen to What They’re Chanting

A close look at the words being shouted at protests on campuses across the country reveals why some see the pro-Palestinian cause as so threatening.

I f you want to gauge whether a protest chant is genocidal or anti-Semitic or disagreeable in any other way, you have to pay attention to more than the words. A chant is a performance, not a text. A leader initiates a call-and-response or else yells into a bullhorn, eliciting roars from the crowd. Hands clap, feet stomp, drums are beaten. The chanting creates a rhythm that can induce a sort of hypnosis, fusing individuals into a movement. The beat should be no more sophisticated than Bum -bah bum- bah bum- bah bum -bah, as in, “ There is on ly one so lu tion! In ti fa da, rev o lu tion! ” To claim that a chant means only what it says is like asserting that a theatrical production is the same as a script.

You can start with the words, though. Take the chant about intifada revolution. Etymologically, intifada denotes a shaking-off, but in contemporary Arabic, it means an uprising: For instance, a 1952 uprising in Iraq against the Hashemite monarchy is referred to in Arabic as an intifada. But in English, including in English-language dictionaries and encyclopedias, the word refers primarily to two periods of sustained Palestinian revolt, the First and Second Intifadas. The first, which ran from 1987 to 1993, involved protests and acts of civil disobedience and was relatively peaceful, at least compared with the second, from 2000 to 2005, which featured Palestinian suicide bombings and targeted reprisal killings by Israeli forces; more than a thousand Israelis died in 138 suicide attacks. These intifadas received so much international press coverage that surely everyone in the world to whom the word means anything at all thinks of them first. The more general idea of insurrection can only be a poor second.

If that’s the association, then intifada is not a phrase that would indicate genocidal intent. Total casualties on both sides during these earlier periods of conflict run to somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000. At its most innocuous, though, it still implies violence. In the context of this particular chant, it might imply much more than that. Revolution doubles and intensifies intifada —an uprising is the beginning of a fight; a revolution is the wholesale destruction of a social order. “There is only one solution”: This has been deemed offensive on the grounds that “solution” evokes the Final Solution, the term used to describe the German decision to kill all Jews during World War II. The more salient point, it seems to me, is that the declaration rejects the idea that there is a political path to peace. It says that diplomacy is not an option, and compromise is not a possibility.

Of course, that’s just the chant on the page. The chant on college campuses is one slogan among many, taking on meaning from those that come before and after it. And, at the same time, it may be uttered by people who don’t care what they’re saying. At any given march or rally, some number of participants will have shown up in order to show up, to signal membership in a movement that they identify with much more than they agree with. When the protesters aren’t directly affected by the matter they’re protesting, the politics of identity frequently supersede the politics of ideas, as Nate Silver pointed out in his Substack newsletter last week. Participating in a political action becomes a way of fitting in, and a chant is the price of admission. As the police enter campus after campus, I’m guessing that the chants also channel rage at the authorities. “Free Palestine!,” sure, but also, Free my friends!

And yet, the plain meaning of a chant has an impact, even if the chanters aren’t fully aware of it. A chant is particularly effective when its message echoes and explains the overall mise-en-scène. “ Globalize the Intifada! ” is an ironically apt chorus for students marching through an American campus under Palestinian flags, their heads shrouded in keffiyehs, their faces covered in KN95 masks. “ We don’t want no Zionists here! ” has the ring of truth when chanted at an encampment where students identified as Zionists have been forced out by a human chain.

The other day, I stood outside a locked gate at Columbia University, near a group of protesters who had presumably come to support the students but couldn’t get inside. From the other side of the gate, a bespectacled student in a keffiyeh worked them into a rage, yelling hoarsely into a microphone and, at moments of peak excitement, jumping up and down. She had her rotation: “ Intifada revolution,” then “Palestine is our demand; no peace on stolen land!” Then “Free, free Palestine!” Then “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” Finally, “Intifada, Intifada!” No one stopping to watch could fail to get the message. The young woman wasn’t calling for a cease-fire or a binational confederation of Palestine and Israel. She was calling for war. Is that anti-Semitic? It depends on whether you think that the violent eradication of the state of Israel is anti-Semitic.

C hants may feel like spontaneous outbursts of political sentiment, but they almost never are. So where do they come from? Social media, of course—most chants are rhyming couplets; repeated a few times, they’re just the right length for an Instagram Story. Another source is the political-organizing manuals that are sometimes called toolkits. These function more or less as a movement’s hymnals.

The “ rally toolkit ” of the group Within Our Lifetime, a radical pro-Palestinian organization with connections on American campuses, lists 40 chants. I’ve heard almost half of them at Columbia, including “Say it loud, say it clear, we don’t want no Zionists here,” which, I learned from the toolkit, is a translation of a chant in Arabic. A fall-2023 Palestine Solidarity Working Group toolkit contains chant sheets from the Palestine Youth Movement and the U.S. Palestinian Community Network . (This word salad of names is in no way nefarious; political organizing is the art of building coalitions.) The lists overlap, with minor differences: The Palestinian Youth Movement’s sheet, for instance, includes several “Cross Movement Chants” that connect the Palestinian cause to others, such as “Stop the U.S. War machine—From Palestine to the Philippines.”

Some observers believe that one toolkit in particular reflects outside influence. A lawsuit claiming that Hamas is working with the national leadership of two organizations, National Students for Justice in Palestine and American Muslims for Palestine, has just been filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern Division of Virginia on behalf of nine American and Israeli plaintiffs, including six victims of October 7; it specifically cites NSJP’s Day of Resistance Toolkit as evidence. The chairman of AMP, Hatem Bazian, who was also one of NSJP’s founders, denies the claim, and told The Washington Post that the lawsuit is a defamatory “Islamophobic text reeking in anti-Palestinian racism.” The question remains to be adjudicated, but it is safe to say that the toolkit makes NSJP’s ideological affinities clear. The toolkit, released immediately after October 7, advised chapters to celebrate Hamas’s attack as a “historic win for the Palestinian resistance” and to lay the groundwork for October 12, “a national day of resistance” on campuses. Student groups across the country did in fact hold rallies and walkouts on October 12, two weeks before Israel invaded Gaza.

The Day of Resistance Toolkit is an extraordinary artifact, written in stilted, triumphalist prose that could have been airlifted out of a badly translated Soviet parade speech. “Fearlessly, our people struggle for complete liberation and return,” the document states. “Glory to our resistance, to our martyrs, and to our steadfast people.” NSJP includes graphics for easy poster-making; one of these is a now-notorious drawing of a crowd cheering a paraglider, a clear allusion to the Hamas militants who paraglided into Israel. And under “Messaging & Framing” come several bullet points; one group of these is preceded by the heading “When people are occupied, resistance is justified.” Under it, one finds the entire state of Israel, a recognized member-state of the United Nations, defined as an occupation, rather than just the West Bank, and its citizens characterized as “settlers” rather than civilians “because they are military assets used to ensure continued control over stolen Palestinian land.” If Israelis are not civilians, of course, then murdering them could count as a legitimate act of war. That heading, inverted (“Resistance is justified when people are occupied”), was soon being chanted by thousands of people around the country. The phrases did not originate with the toolkit, but it surely gave them a boost.

Many protest chants come across as unoriginal, but lack of originality is actually desirable. The more familiar a chant’s wording and cadence, the easier it is to pick up. A chant modeled on a much older one may also subtly advance a geopolitical argument. “ Hey hey, ho ho! Zionism has got to go! ,” which is an echo of “Hey hey, ho ho! LBJ has got to go!,” suggests a link between Gaza and Vietnam, Israeli imperialism and American imperialism. I don’t think that’s a stretch. The 1968 analogy is everywhere. Last week, I watched a Columbia protest leader praise a crowd by saying that they’re continuing what the anti-war protesters started. That night, dozens of today’s protesters did exactly that by occupying Hamilton Hall, also occupied in 1968.

I’m guessing that the Houthis—another Iranian-backed terrorist group, which controls a part of Yemen—provided a template for at least one chant. Around February, Columbia’s protesters were recorded chanting “ There is no safe place! Death to the Zionist state! ,” which struck me, in this context, as a taunting reply to Jewish students’ complaints about safety, followed by what sounded like a version of the actual, official Houthi slogan “God Is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam.” And indeed, a month earlier, the crowd had openly chanted in support of the Houthis, who had been firing missiles at ships traveling through the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. The U.S. and Britain had just begun bombing them to stop the attacks, and the students sang, “ Yemen, Yemen, make us proud, turn another ship around! ”

Does support for the Houthis and alleged support for Hamas mean that the students also support the groups’ sponsor, Iran? I doubt that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the student groups exchange messages on Signal. But at the very least, the chants raise the possibility that some of the more extreme radicals on campus align themselves with the Iranian government’s geopolitical orientation more than with America’s, and have somehow persuaded their followers to mouth such views.

O ne slogan, however, has become emblematic of the debate over the possible anti-Semitic content of pro-Palestinian chants. Its stature can be attributed, in part, to Republican Representative Elise Stefanik, who infamously insisted, during hearings on campus anti-Semitism, that it amounted to a call for genocide. The slogan, of course, is “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Israel’s supporters hear it as eliminationist: From the Jordan to the Mediterranean, which is to say, across the land that had been under British control before it was partitioned by the United Nations in 1947, Palestine will be free of Jews . Where are they supposed to go? Many Jews find the possible answers to that question very disturbing. Palestinians and their allies, however, reject the Jewish interpretation as a form of catastrophizing. They say that the chant expresses the dream of a single, secular, democratic nation in which Palestinians and Jews would live peacefully side by side, in lieu of the existing Jewish ethno-nationalist state. (It is hard to dispute that in this scenario, Jewish Israelis would lose the power of collective self-determination.)

Before “From the river to the sea” caught on in English, it was chanted in Arabic. It is not clear when it first came into use, but Elliott Colla, a scholar of Arabic and Islamic studies at Georgetown University, believes that it emerged during the First Intifada—or rather, two versions of it did. One was nationalist: “ Min al-maiyeh lel mayieh, Falasteen Arabiya ”: “From water to water, Palestine is Arab.” The other was Islamist: “ Falasteen Islamiyyeh, min al-nahr ila al-bahr ”: “Palestine is Islamic from the river to the sea.” At some point during the Oslo peace process, Colla says, a third chant appeared: “ Min al-nahr ila al-bahr, Falasteen satataharrar ,” or “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” “It is this version—with its focus on freedom —that has circulated within English-language solidarity culture from at least the 1990s,” Colla writes in a recent article .

Therefore, Colla writes, “Palestine will be free” should be considered a new chant expressing the ideal of a more inclusive state, not merely a translation of the older, more aggressive chants. It gives voice to a “much more capacious vision of a shared political project.” The problem with Colla’s benign reading of the slogan, however, is that the more nationalist or Islamist Arab-language chants are still in circulation; they share airtime with the English-language variant at American protests. In January, I started seeing videos of American students chanting “ Min al-maiyeh lel mayieh, Falasteen Arabiya . ” The menace implicit in the Arabic chant bleeds into the English-language version.

If a chant’s meaning changes according to the other ones being chanted at the same event, the signs being waved, the leader’s general affect, and so on, then today’s chants of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” are not beautiful messages of peace. A voice breaking the calm of a neoclassical quad with harsh cries of “ Intifada, Intifada ” is not a harbinger of harmonious coexistence. “We don’t want two states! We want all of it!” seems especially uncompromising when sung next to snow that’s been stained blood-red with paint. (I imagine that the red snow was meant to allude to the blood of Gazans, but sometimes a symbol means more than it is intended to mean.) Student protesters often say that all they want is for the killing to stop. That may well be true. But that is not what they’re chanting, or how they’re chanting it.