Allocate
adj, noun, verb ·Moderate ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 A writ authorizing payment, allowance, grant. UK, historical, obsolete
- 1 To set aside for a purpose.
"Please do not eat the meringue, as it is allocated for the dinner party tomorrow."
- 2 distribute according to a plan or set apart for a special purpose wordnet
- 3 To distribute according to a plan, generally followed by the adposition to.
"The bulk of K–12 education funds are allocated to school districts that in turn pay for the cost of operating schools."
- 4 To reserve a portion of memory for use by a computer program.
"The memory manager allocates memory to requesting processes until there is no more memory available or until there are no more processes waiting for memory."
- 1 allocated not-comparable, obsolete
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"Allocate a room for research purposes."
Etymology
From Latin allocātus, perfect passive participle of Latin allocō (see -ate (verb-forming suffix)), from ad- (“to”) + locō. Doublet of allow.
From Middle English allocat(e) (“allocated”), originally used as the past participle of allocate, from Latin allocātus, see -ate (adjective-forming suffix) and Etymology 1 for more.
From Middle English allocate (the common first word of writs authorizing payment), from Medieval Latin allocātum, substantivized from the nominative neuter singular of allocātus, see -ate (noun-forming suffix) and Etymology 1 for more. Alternatively, from allocāte, the second-person plural imperative of allocō, compare English liberate (“a warrant for the payment of a pension, allowance, debt, etc.”).
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.