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expectation.

The act or state of expecting or looking forward to an event as about to happen.

11 characters4 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/ˌɛk.spɛkˈteɪ.ʃən/Canada, General-American, Received-Pronunciation/ˌek.spekˈtæɪ.ʃən/Australia, New-Zealand
  1. The act or state of expecting or looking forward to an event as about to happen.

    countable · uncountable
  2. That which is expected or looked for.

    countable · uncountable
  3. That which is expected or looked for. An implicit obligation or duty held by another in someone's view.

    countable · uncountable
    He struggled with his parents' expectations.
  4. The prospect of the future; grounds upon which something excellent is expected to occur; prospect of anything good to come, especially of property or rank.

    countable · uncountable
  5. The value of any chance (as the prospect of prize or property) which depends upon some contingent event.

    countable · uncountable
  6. The first moment; the expected value; the long-run average value of a variable over many independent repetitions of an experiment.

    countable · uncountable
  7. The arithmetic mean.

    colloquial · countable · uncountable
  8. The leaving of a disease principally to the efforts of nature to effect a cure.

    countable · rare · uncountable
Where this word comes from

From Middle French expectation, from Latin exspectātiō, from exspectō (“expect”). By surface analysis, expect + -ation. Displaced native Old English wēn.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.