| 词组 | admission, admittance |
| 释义 | admission, admittance "Admittance is usu[ally] applied to mere physical entrance to a locality or a building: admission applies to entrance or formal acceptance (as into a club) that carries with it rights, privileges, standing, or membership." This discrimination appears in Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, and others like it can be found in usage books from Vizetelly 1906 to Harper 1985. Ambrose Bierce 1909 stands alone: he refuses to sanction admission for admittance in "The price of admission is one dollar." The distinction is one you can certainly make in your writing if you want to. Copperud 1970 reports some commentators as feeling that the distinction is disappearing and others as feeling that the two words are simply synonyms. Certainly there have been writers of repute who have not observed the distinction. Physical entrance: • ... somebody must gain admittance to his cell — George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, 1859 • Tom lifted him in his arms, and got admission to the Inn —George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, 1859 Permission to enter an academic institution: • ... the parental demand that their offspring obtain admittance to a four-year college —James B. Co-nant, Slums and Suburbs, 1961 • ... the attempt of James Meredith, a Negro, to obtain admission to the University of Mississippi — Current Biography, July 1965 Permission to join the union as a state: • ... a constitutional provision ... it had to eliminate from its constitution as a condition of admittance in 1912 —Thomas P. Neill, The Common Good (12th-gradetext), 1956 • ... until the size of the population warranted the territory's admission as a state —John H. Haefner et al., Our Living Government (12th-grade text), 1960 Permission to join the United Nations: • ... the demand from overseas for the immediate admittance of Communist China to the United Nations —Richard H. Rovere, New Yorker, 8 Aug. 1953 • ... celebrating Japan's admission to the United Nations —Current Biography, December 1965 Entrance to society: • ... a very accessible and, at the same time, highly enviable society. Whatever the quality that gained you admittance —Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth, 1942 • ... all the nice men she knew of moved in circles into which an obscure governess had no chance of admission —George Bernard Shaw, Cashel Byron 's Profession, 1886 Or to some other institution: • ... admittance to the academy is a coveted honor — Current Biography, March 1964 • ... insisting now on stricter standards of admission to the church —Edmund S. Morgan, N.Y. Times Book Rev., 13 July 1980 For a fee paid to gain entrance, admission is much more common, but admittance is not unknown: • ... open to anyone with 500 yuan to spare, which at 3,000 yuan to the dollar, is not a ruinous admittance —James Cameron, N. Y. Times Mag., 9 Jan. 1955 • ... there is no admission fee —Village Voice, 28 Feb. 1968 • ... the price of admission is starkly prohibitive — Norman Cousins, Saturday Rev., 21 Feb. 1976 These last two examples show contexts in which admittance is no longer used—in the attributive position, and in the phrase "price of " There is a distinction between the two words when preceded by no. The sign "No Admittance" refers to physical entrance, but no admission is likely to mean no admission fee: • ALL FREE—NO ADMISSION —advt., Ochiltree County (Tex.) Herald, 15 Jan. 1967 • Documentary film ... shown several times daily. No admission —Where Mag., 15 Mar. 1975 The persons who deal with the entrance of students to educational institutions regularly use admission, often in the plural: • ... college admissions officers —Robert L. Foose, NEA Jour., January 1965 • ... an open admissions policy —Theodore L. Gross, Saturday Rev., 4 Feb. 1978 Admission is the usual word for the granting of something not proven or an acknowledgment that something is true: • To ask for a pardon was, he said, an admission of guilt —Robert Penn Warren, Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back, 1980 Fifty-four percent of the Harper 1985 usage panel, however, confesses to not distinguishing in speech between "admittance to the theater" and "admission of guilt." Perhaps they did not think out the implications of their statement. Admittance in the sense it would have in "admittance of guilt" is labeled obsolete in the OED, which shows no citations since the 17th century. It appears, rather, to be very rare; Merriam-Webster editors have unearthed a couple of 20th-century instances. One was an oral use by Johnny Pesky, a former Boston Red Sox shortstop: • ... by his own admittance yesterday, said that he always hated to ... —2 May 1971 The other was in print by a distinguished historian: • This is splendid until one is brought up sharply by this naīve admittance —J. H. Plumb, Saturday Rev., 29 July 1967 Although many authors have used admission and admittance synonymously, there is no harm in your making the distinction outlined in the Collegiate if you want to. Except for the sign "No Admittance" and the use of admittance as a technical term in electricity, admission is the more frequent word in all uses in current English. |
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