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to assign

to assign

47 3.2
Say that a person or cause made something
  • verb
  • /əˈsaɪn/
translation icon : atribuir (a)
  • I cannot understand how anyone can assign a value to crypto.
  • assign meaning
  • assign blame
  • assign attributes

Or are you just, you just assigning that title to yourself?

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Examples

  • But we have to understand that there is a value that we assign people when we are mating or dating.

  • It's interesting how much value you assign to the task of asking the right questions.

  • But the thing that I have grabbed is I get to assign meaning to it.

  • What exercises might you have those students do or readings that you would assign to help them with?

  • So we discover that something is wrong with wheat and we assign the issue to gluten.

  • Mrs. Charlela assigned us another essay.

  • Other common judgments include assigning a letter grade or a festival rating.

    Academic text (2011)
  • Learn about the power and utility of basic descriptive statistics for assigning meaning to large sets of data.

    Academic text (2015)
  • The AI had analyzed the morphemes it identified in their speech and assigned probable meaning to the combinations.

    Fiction book (1996)
  • In our discussion, we need to assign credit to everyone who contributed to the project.

Synonyms

to attribute
vsto assign
228 3.8

To say that something comes from a person or thing

is a neutral act of giving cause or ownership to someone
to credit
vsto assign
110 3.5

To publicly say someone is responsible for something

is a neutral act of naming a source without public emphasis
to ascribe
vsto assign
35 6.8

Think that something is caused by a person or thing

is the neutral act of giving cause rather than judging it
to impute
vsto assign
  • Formal
11 8.7

To blame a person or thing for something bad, often without proof

is the neutral act of giving cause without blame or unfairness
to lay at the feet of
vsto assign
1 8.1

To say someone caused or deserves credit for something

is the neutral act of giving cause without idiomatic tone

Antonyms

2.0

To say that something is not true

37 5.8

Refuse to accept someone or something and stop having any connection with them

How Attributed

to credit
110 3.5
to assign
47 3.2
to ascribe
35 6.8
to suggest
1.6

Surface Forms

assign infinitive
assigned past
assigned past participle
assigning present participle
assigns third person singular

Morphology

assign = sign (opaque) = as + sign

The attribution sense ('to ascribe or credit') is a semantic shift from 'to mark' and is not something an average learner would reliably infer from 'sign'.

Etymology

Assign comes from Latin signare 'to mark' and is related to sign, so to assign a work or idea to someone is to mark it as theirs or to give them the credit.