Rejection

How to spell rejection

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce rejection

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does rejection mean?

1. nounThe act of refusing, dismissing, or declining a person, request, or thing.
2. nounThe body's immune response that attacks and refuses to accept a transplanted organ or tissue.

Rejection in a sentence

• The publisher sent a polite rejection of her manuscript.

• The patient took medication to prevent organ rejection after the transplant.

• He handled the job rejection with surprising calm.

• Early signs of rejection prompted the doctors to adjust her treatment.

Where does rejection come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb reicere, meaning 'to throw back' or 'to cast aside', formed from the prefix re- (back) and jacere (to throw). The past participle stem gave Latin reiectio, a noun for the act of throwing something away or refusing it. English took the word in during the fifteenth century, borrowing it through French and directly from Latin, and it first carried the legal and medical sense of discarding or refusing. The same jacere root throws itself into a whole family of English words, including 'eject', 'project', 'inject', and 'reject', all of which involve some kind of throwing. Knowing that the middle is the throwing element 'ject' helps fix the spelling, since the only soft trap is the -tion ending sounding like 'shun'.

How the word is built

• re- (back)
• ject (from Latin jacere: to throw)
• -ion (noun suffix)