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