Skip to main content
Glite Dictionary
🚫 To send away forever 📦 To send for sale 🗝️ To give for safekeeping
to consign

to consign

14 7.9
Send something or someone away so they are forgotten and never used again
  • verb
  • /kənˈsaɪn/
translation icon : condenar a
  • In Belgrade, after the partition, a Tito museum was consigned to the dustbin of history.
  • consigned to oblivion
  • consigned to the past

We've created ideologies which cannot be gain said, and anyone who does gain say them is consigned to various circles of hell.

Examples

  • We can finally consign my old bird to the scrap heap.

    The English Patient (1996)

  • It is simply wrong to consign people to a grim future of authoritarian rule and repression.

  • So those classic systems of oppression are now consigned to the history books.

  • But the body must be consigned to God for absolution.

    Season of the Witch (2011)

  • Dancy was then removed from her job and consigned to the cataloging department.

    Academic text (2000)

  • The pressures for Guadeloupeans to assimilate to metropolitan norms consign Haitians to a particularly disempowered position.

    Academic text (2003)

  • The majority of urban Africans had already been consigned to African-only townships prior to the advent of apartheid in 1948.

    Academic text (1998)

  • Furthermore, Russian suzerainty over the area consigns it to perpetual backwardness, underdevelopment, and hence authoritarianism and conflict.

    Academic text (2004)

  • Yale's Othniel Marsh reprised his Cardiff role, examining the hoax and consigning it to scientific oblivion.

    Academic text (2005)

  • The company decided to consign their artwork to an auction house for sale.

Synonyms

to commit
vsto consign
  • Formal
44 7.0

To send someone by legal order to prison or hospital

delivers something irreversibly often permanently to a place or person

Antonyms

to retain
236 3.4

To keep having something such as a job or possession

to withhold
210 5.1

Refuse to give something someone wants or needs

How Final

to doom
113 5.8
to consign
14 7.9
to deliver
933 1.0
to send
∞ 1.0

Surface Forms

consign infinitive
consigned past
consigned past participle
consigning present participle
consigns third person singular

Morphology

consign = sign (opaque) = con + sign

Although formally analyzable as 'con-' + 'sign', the modern meaning 'deliver/transfer to custody' is a specialized sense inherited from borrowings rather than a predictable result of productive prefixation.

Etymology

Consign comes from the Latin word consignare, made of con- ('together') and signare ('to mark' or 'to seal'), and it shares the same root as the common word sign. So to be consigned to a fate is like having your future 'sealed' — a choice or result put down that is hard to change.