Adopt
verbTo legally take another person's child into your family and raise it as your own.
How to spell adopt
5 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce adopt
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does adopt mean?
- verbTo legally take another person's child into your family and raise it as your own.
- verbTo take up and start using a method, idea, or course of action.
Adopt in a sentence
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The couple decided to adopt a child after years of waiting.
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The board voted to adopt a new accounting system next year.
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They chose to adopt after several years of fostering children.
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Schools across the region plan to adopt the updated curriculum.
Where does adopt come from?
Language of origin: Latin
This word traces back to the Latin verb adoptare, which combined the prefix ad-, meaning 'to' or 'toward', with optare, meaning 'to choose' or 'to wish for'. The literal idea was to choose someone for yourself, especially to choose a person to bring into your family as your own. Roman law used adoptare in exactly this sense, since formally taking a son was a recognised legal act. English borrowed the word in the 1500s, partly through the French adopter, and quickly widened it from taking in children to taking up ideas, customs, and methods. The same optare root survives in the everyday words 'option' and 'opt', so remembering that to adopt is to opt for something can help fix the single 'd' and 'p' in the spelling.
How the word is built
- ad- (to)
- opt (from Latin optare: to choose)
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