Noun

(label) The power to enforce rules or give orders.

* 1883 , (Howard Pyle), (The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood)

But in the meantime Robin Hood and his band lived quietly in Sherwood Forest, without showing their faces abroad, for Robin knew that it would not be wise for him to be seen in the neighborhood of Nottingham, those in authority being very wroth with him.

(label) Persons in command; specifically, government.

*{{quote-book, year=1927, author= F. E. Penny

, chapter=4, title= Pulling the Strings , passage=The case was that of a murder. It had an element of mystery about it, however, which was puzzling the authorities . A turban and loincloth soaked in blood had been found; also a staff.}}

* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-08-10, volume=408, issue=8848, magazine=(The Economist)

, title= Legal highs: A new prescription , passage=No sooner has a [synthetic] drug been blacklisted than chemists adjust their recipe and start churning out a subtly different one. These “legal highs” are sold for the few months it takes the authorities to identify and ban them, and then the cycle begins again.}}

(label) A person accepted as a source of reliable information on a subject.

* 1930 September 18, Albert Einstein, as quoted in Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel (1988) by Banesh Hoffman

To punish me for my contempt of authority', Fate has made me an ' authority myself.

Noun

(en noun)

The act of assigning; the allocation of a job or a set of tasks.

This flow chart represents the assignment of tasks in our committee.

The categorization of something as belonging to a specific category.

We should not condone the assignment of asylum seekers to that of people smugglers.

An assigned task.

The assignment the department gave him proved to be quite challenging.

A position to which someone is assigned.

Unbeknownst to Mr Smith, his new assignment was in fact a demotion.

(education) A task given to students, such as homework or coursework.

Mrs Smith gave out our assignments , and said we had to finish them by Monday.

(legal) A transfer of something from one person to another, especially property, or a claim or right.

The assignment of the lease has not been finalised yet.

(legal) A document that effects this transfer.

Once you receive the assignment in the post, be sure to sign it and send it back as soon as possible.

(computing) An operation that assigns a value to a variable.