appropriate

Suitable or fit; proper; felicitous.

Adjective

  1. Suitable or fit; proper; felicitous.
    • The headmaster wondered what an appropriate measure would be to make the pupil behave better.
    • 1798-1801, Beilby Porteus, Lecture XI delivered in the Parish Church of St. James, Westminster in its strict and appropriate meaning
    • appropriate acts of divine worship - 1710, Edward Stillingfleet, Several Conferences Between a Romish Priest, a Fanatick Chaplain, and a Divine of the Church of England Concerning the Idolatry of the Church of Rome:
  2. Suitable to the social situation or to social respect or social discreetness; socially correct; socially discreet; well-mannered; proper.
    • I don't think it was appropriate for the cashier to tell me out loud in front of all those people at the checkout that my hairpiece looked like it was falling out of place.
    • While it is not considered appropriate for a professor to date his student, there is no such concern once the semester has ended.
    • With such focus from within the footballing community this week on Remembrance Sunday, there was something appropriate about Colchester being the venue for last night’s game. Troops from the garrison town formed a guard...
  3. Set apart for a particular use or person; reserved.
  4. Of an action or thing: morally good; positive.
    • Rescuing animals is an appropriate thing to do.
  5. Of an action or thing: pleasant.

Origin

From Middle English appropriat (“appropriated”), see -ate (adjective-forming suffix) and Etymology 1 for more.

Forms

more appropriate most appropriate

Synonyms

apt felicitous fitting suitable

Antonyms

inappropriate unhappy

Related

appropriation proper property

Derived

appropes appropriately appropriateness nonappropriate unappropriate age-appropriate appropriate adult appropriate technology culturally appropriate

Verb

  1. To take to oneself; to claim or use, especially as by an exclusive right.
    • Let no man appropriate the use of a common benefit.
    • "I promise you," said she, after a pause of some minutes, "to wear the last new dress you gave me, it is a triumph of taste!" Lord Marchmont bowed, and appropriated the compliment as if the taste had been his own, not...
    • We made an odd party before the arrival of the Ten, particularly when the Celebrity dropped in for lunch or dinner. He could not be induced to remain permanently at Mohair because Miss Trevor was at Asquith, but he...
  2. To set apart for, or assign to, a particular person or use, especially in exclusion of all others; with to or for.
    • A spot of ground is appropriated for a garden.
    • to appropriate money for the increase of the navy
    • 2012, The Washington Post, David Nakamura and Tom Hamburger, "Put armed police in every school, NRA urges" "I call on Congress today to act immediately to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers...
  3. To annex (for example a benefice, to a spiritual corporation, as its property).
    • Some [benefices] were appropriated to secular ecclesiastical corporations - 176, William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, book, Oxford, Oxfordshire: […] Clarendon Press, →OCLC:
  4. To make suitable to; to suit.
    • Under the towers were a number of gloomy subterraneous apartments with vaulted roofs, the use of which imagination was left to guess, and could only appropriate to punishment and horror. - 1790, Helen Maria Williams,...
    • Were we to take a portion of the skin, and contemplate its exquisite sensibility, so finely appropriated […] we should have no occasion to draw our argument, for the twentieth time, from the structure of the eye or the...
    • The fellow across the road gives up farming and turns his place into a pastoral bootleggery . Picnickers appropriate the lawn and declare for the proletariat . The sheriff comes , argues with them and they depart ,...

Origin

From Middle English appropriaten, from appropriat (“appropriated”) + -en, borrowed from Latin appropriātus, perfect passive participle of appropriō (“to make one's own”), from ad (“to”) + propriō (“to make one's own”), from proprius (“one's own, private”) + -ō (first conjugation verb-forming suffix).

Forms

appropriates appropriating appropriated

Synonyms

help oneself impropriate steal allocate earmark

Derived

appropriater appropriative appropriator disappropriate malappropriate misappropriate reappropriate unappropriate