Annexation

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The act of incorporating a territory into an existing political unit such as a country or state
2. The act of formally adding a territory to a state or nation involves taking over a region and incorporating it into an existing political structure
3. The process of legally adding land to a sovereign state or political entity

Etymology: Annexation comes from the Latin verb "annectere," meaning "to tie or bind to," built from "ad" ("to") and "nectere" ("to bind"). The same binding idea runs through the English word "connect," which is a close relative, though it reached English through a different route. The Latin noun "annexatio" meant the act of attaching one thing to another, and it passed into medieval Latin with that same sense of joining. The core image is physical: one object fastened onto another. The political sense grew out of this attaching idea. A territory is bound onto a larger state, much as a rider or appendix is fixed to a document. Because the word was already used for joining things together, applying it to land and sovereignty was a natural extension, and the modern meaning of seizing or absorbing territory rests on this older image of fastening one part onto a whole.

Synonyms: addition, attachment, incorporation, acquisition, conquest

Antonyms: secession, division, disconnection, detachment, withdrawal