Word of the Day

Monday March 29, 2010

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approbation [ap-ruh-BAY-shuhn]

noun

1. The act of approving; official recognition or approval.
2. Sanction; praise; commendation.

• By stepping up their presence in the library, adult leaders of the Mattapan community can signal safety and approbation to those teenagers who want to use the library appropriately while encouraging the few troublemakers to shape up or ship out.
  Gwynne Morgan, "It takes a village to keep peace at the library", Boston Globe, Feb 3, 2010
• It was about the books, of course, but more. I still can taste the delicious delight of traipsing triumphantly up its steps every Saturday morning, hauling back the five or six books I had taken out the week before, waiting for the approbation that never came from the librarian about how wonderful I was to have read all those books in just a week.
  Richard J Deasy, "THE LIBRARIES OF LIFE FOR MANY OF US, EDUCATION WAS AN OPEN BOOK", Pittsburgh Post - Gazette, Oct 10, 2009
• I wrote for their amendment, and not their approbation. The united praise of the whole race would be of less consequence to me, than the neighing of those two degenerate Houyhnhnms I keep in my stable; because from these, degenerate as they are, I still improve in some virtues without any mixture of vice.
  Jonathan Swift (1667 - 1745) An Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist and poet. Gulliver's Travels (1726)

Origin of the Word

Approbation, approximately 1400, derives from Old French aprobation, from Latin approbare "to assent to as good, regard as good," from ad- "to" + probare "to try, test something (to find if it is good)," from probus "honest, genuine."