Acknowledgment

How to spell acknowledgment

14 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce acknowledgment

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does acknowledgment mean?

1. nounThe act of recognising or admitting the truth, existence, or importance of something.
2. nounA message or note confirming that something has been received.
3. nounA statement of thanks to those who helped, often printed at the front of a book.

Acknowledgment in a sentence

• Her nod was a quiet acknowledgment that the plan had failed.

• The bank sent an acknowledgment as soon as the payment cleared.

• The author thanked her editor in a warm acknowledgment at the end.

• The report contained no acknowledgment of the earlier mistakes.

• Please keep the email acknowledgment until your order arrives.

• Every contributor received a personal acknowledgment in the report.

Where does acknowledgment come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows out of the verb 'acknowledge', which appeared in English around the fifteenth century as a blend of two older elements: the Middle English verb 'knowlechen', meaning 'to recognise or confess', and an earlier verb 'acknow', which descended from the Old English 'oncnawan', 'to understand or recognise'. The fused verb gained an intensive prefix that was later respelled 'ac-' by analogy with Latin words in which 'ad-' (meaning 'to') assimilated before a 'c'. The abstract noun was then formed by adding the suffix '-ment', borrowed through French from Latin '-mentum', which turns an action into the name of that action or its result. Notice that the root is simply the everyday word 'knowledge' with its silent 'k' and its 'dg' spelling intact, which is exactly why writers waver over whether to keep the 'e' before '-ment'. In this form the 'e' after 'g' is dropped, leaving 'acknowledgment', the variant standard in American usage and widely accepted elsewhere.

How the word is built

• ac- (intensive prefix, variant of ad-, meaning 'to')
• knowledge (recognition, awareness)
• -ment (noun-forming suffix)