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Promise vs Attestation - What's the difference?

promise | attestation | Related terms |

As nouns the difference between promise and attestation

is that promise is an oath or affirmation; a vow while attestation is a thing that serves to bear witness, confirm, authenticate, validation, verification, documentation.

As a verb promise

is to commit to something or action; to make an oath; make a vow.

promise

English

Alternative forms

* promyse

Noun

(en noun)
  • An oath or affirmation; a vow.
  • A transaction between two persons whereby the first person undertakes in the future to render some service or gift to the second person or devotes something valuable now and here to his use.
  • * 1668 July 3rd, , “Thomas Rue contra'' Andrew Hou?toun” in ''The Deci?ions of the Lords of Council & Se??ion I (Edinburgh, 1683), pages 547–548
  • He pur?ued Andrew Hou?toun upon his promi?e , to give him the like Sallary for the next year, and in ab?ence obtained him to be holden as confe?t and Decerned.
  • Reason to expect improvement or success; potential.
  • * Washington Irving
  • My native country was full of youthful promise .
  • * {{quote-book, year=1963, author=(Margery Allingham), chapter=1
  • , title=(The China Governess) citation , passage=The original family who had begun to build a palace to rival Nonesuch had died out before they had put up little more than the gateway, so that the actual structure which had come down to posterity retained the secret magic of a promise rather than the overpowering splendour of a great architectural achievement.}}
  • (computing, programming) A placeholder object that can be manipulated in code before it has been assigned a value.
  • (obsolete) Bestowal or fulfillment of what is promised.
  • * Bible, Acts i. 4
  • He commanded them that they should not depart from Jerusalem, but wait for the promise of the Father.

    Verb

    (promis)
  • To commit to something or action; to make an oath; make a vow.
  • * {{quote-magazine, date=2013-06-22, volume=407, issue=8841, page=70, magazine=(The Economist)
  • , title= Engineers of a different kind , passage=Private-equity nabobs bristle at being dubbed mere financiers.
  • To give grounds for expectation, especially of something good.
  • The clouds promise rain.
  • * {{quote-book, year=1897, author=
  • , title=(The Celebrity), chapter=1 citation , passage=I liked the man for his own sake, and even had he promised to turn out a celebrity it would have had no weight with me. I look upon notoriety with the same indifference as on the buttons on a man's shirt-front, or the crest on his note-paper.}}

    Usage notes

    * This is a catenative verb that takes the to infinitive . See

    Synonyms

    *

    See also

    * (election promise)

    Statistics

    *

    attestation

    English

    Noun

    (Attested language) (en noun)
  • A thing that serves to bear witness, confirm, authenticate, validation, verification, documentation.
  • A confirmation or authentication.
  • (business, finance) The process, performed by accountants or auditors, of providing independent opinion on published financial and other business information of a business, public agency, or other organization.
  • (linguistics, of a language or word) An appearance in print or otherwise recorded on a permanent medium.
  • * 1997 , Roger Lass, Historical Linguistics and Language Change , page 23,
  • So something must have been developing over long periods empty of attestation ; and whatever it was, it must (by principles to be discussed in the next section) have been a language of the usual kind.
  • * 2009 , Ingo Plag, Maria Braun, Sabine Lappe, Mareile Schramm, Introduction to English Linguistics , page 110,
  • For each word, the date of its first attestation in the English language, as documented in the Oxford English Dictionary'', and its frequency of occurrence in the ''British National Corpus are given.
  • * 2010 , Kathryn Allan, Tracing metonymic polysemy through time: MATERIAL FOR OBJECT mappings in the OED'', Margaret E. Winters, Heli Tissari, Kathryn Allan (editors), ''Historical Cognitive Linguistics , page 176,
  • Furthermore, the first attestations' given in the ''OED'' are not always the earliest '''attestations''' in print; since the first edition was finished in 1928, many earlier and later examples have been identified, and these will be incorporated into the third edition, currently underway (see Durkin 2002 for a discussion of how much this is likely to change the dates of '''attestation in the ''OED as a whole).