Appoint

How to spell appoint

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce appoint

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does appoint mean?

1. verbTo officially choose someone for a job, position, or duty.
2. verbTo decide on or fix a time, date, or place for something.

Appoint in a sentence

• The board agreed to appoint a new finance director before the end of the quarter.

• They agreed to appoint a date for the wedding once the venue was confirmed.

• The minister has the power to appoint judges to the higher courts.

• The lawyer asked the court to appoint a hearing for early March.

Where does appoint come from?

Language of origin: French

Appoint came into English in the late 1300s from the Old French verb apointier, which meant to arrange, to settle, or to bring matters to a point of agreement. That French verb was built from the phrase a point, literally 'to a point', combining a (from the Latin ad, meaning 'to') with point (from the Latin punctum, 'a pricked dot or point'). The earliest English uses kept this French sense of fixing or settling something precisely, as in appointing a time or place, and the meaning of naming a person to an office grew naturally out of the idea of formally settling who should hold it. The shared root with 'point' is a handy memory aid: appoint is simply ap- plus the ordinary word point, so the spelling never doubles the p in the middle even though the two p sounds tempt some writers to. The same punctum ancestor sits inside familiar relatives such as 'punctual', 'puncture', and 'punctuation', all carrying the original idea of a precise point.

How the word is built

• ap- (a-, from Latin ad, meaning 'to')
• point (from Old French point, ultimately Latin punctum, 'a point')