The situation that unites these words is one in which a person is being chosen to fulfil a given function by someone else. Unlike other ways of matching people to tasks, these words imply an official situation ?in an office, club or government ?in which the choice is made by means other than an elective process. Appoint indicates that the selection is made by someone officially charged with this duty, although the actual selection itself may be arbitrary or judicious: Members of Parliament are elected by the people, while public officials are appointed by the Crown. Of this set name is the most informal and tells least about the chooser or the method of choice adopted: Since no one has volunteered, I hereby name the following to serve on the entertainment committee. Thus the word sometimes stresses outcome rather than process: a judge named as a party to the decision.

Designate is the most formal of all these terms, even to the point of stiffness. It can be useful to distinguish from appoint a process of selection that is only quasi-official in nature: The new manager designated as his secretary the girl who had been head of the typing pool.

Assign differs from the other words here in that it most often refers, not to the picking of a person for a task, but to the delegation of a task to one or more members of a group. It has a overtone, not invariably present, of arbitrariness, possibly a resentment of having no say in what has been assigned to us. It is occasionally used of people rather than of the task, in this case, the person being assigned usually joins others already designated in a common task: Jones is assigned to mess duty, Smith is assigned to guard duty, and Anderson is assigned to the quartermaster’s store.