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Acceptance vs Acceptation

Acceptance and acceptation have both at one time or another carried the meanings: the act or fact of accepting or the state of being accepted. Present usage, however, restricts their denotations.

Acceptance only is used to denote the act of accepting.

  • a blind acceptance of authority
    Inge

Or the state of one who accepts something, especially something inevitable or inescapable.

  • all settled back into a sad sort of acceptance of the situation
    Delano1)

Both acceptance and acceptation may be used to denote the state of being accepted or especially of being approved or believed.

  • metrical forms are conventional, and therefore rest . . . on acceptance
    Lowes

Acceptation tends, however, to confine itself to denoting the sense in which a word or expression is generally received.

  • not… a cultivated man in the ordinary acceptation of the words
    Eliot