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1An appointment to meet someone in secret, typically one made by lovers.
‘his assignation with an older woman’
‘He had already made a few assignations with the lowlife drug dealers who frequented the place.’
‘Favourite spots for sneaked assignations are empty classrooms, deserted corridors and overgrown lots.’
‘He's outside the required 400-mile limit for extramarital quickies and anonymous assignations.’
‘Over the last few years, a vocal minority of local residents have raised objections to assignations by gay men in the Square in the middle of the night.’
‘There would be no assignations, no letters, no phone calls.’
‘The other is a lurid science fiction tale, made up by the woman's demon lover during assignations in rundown, disreputable places.’
‘The researchers found that females were sneaking away into the jungle for assignations with the handsome young ‘hunks’ of the band.’
‘In a few hours there is to be an appointment with a professor, then later, an assignation at the pub.’
‘The small private dining rooms that characterized most restaurants offered the possibility of forbidden political dinners or risky amorous assignations.’
‘Her assignations with her lover, a theatre director can be heard in the tiny courtyard.’
‘New relationships, secret assignations and a dazzling necklace add to their complicated lives.’
‘None of her assignations sounds like much fun and her home life was no happier.’
‘It is believed that the original carnival was a much bigger and rowdier affair with fights, bear baitings and puppet shows, bull fights and secret assignations in gondolas.’
‘She is eventually sacked after one of her secret assignations with him is discovered.’
‘In this odd urban pastoral, people wander about London, have lunch, try to make assignations, wake up with hangovers and never get anywhere.’
‘There was nothing - no sign or menu - to distinguish it from all the other houses with their wood-shingle roofs and bamboo shutters and histories of hidden assignations.’
‘They've gone on romantic assignations at the historic Fairmont Hotel.’
‘Their fans fluttered as the men commented on their appearance or nodded, touched an arm here, felt the wares there, and made assignations.’
‘He kept a secret journal of his assignations with high-power closeted Hollywood players and revelled in his clandestine life as a quasi-hooker.’
‘Initials meant secret assignations, though there were no locations.’
2The allocation or attribution of someone or something as belonging to something.
‘Was it designed to implicate as many individuals as possible in the killings, and thus to make any future assignation of responsibility for specific acts of genocide just about impossible?’
‘More data are necessary to understand the significance of a possibly general assignation of short branches to basal and species-poor taxa by tree-reconstruction algorithms.’
‘Haplotypes usually have to be estimated from the genotype data, with random assignation whenever the haplotype cannot be inferred unambiguously.’
‘The overall level of correct assignation of parent varieties was higher when P was used at a level of 0.99.’
Origin
Late Middle English (in the senses ‘command, appointment to office, or allotment of revenue’): via Old French from Latin assignatio(n-), from the verb assignare (see assign).