Capitulating

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. Stopping opposition and yielding control or power to an opponent
2. Giving up resistance and agreeing to demands or conditions imposed by another
3. Relinquishing opposition and accepting defeat by conceding to others

Etymology: Medieval monks gave the word its first sense, and it had nothing to do with surrender. Medieval Latin "capitulare" meant to draw up a text under distinct headings, since a "capitulum" was a heading or chapter, a diminutive of "caput", "head". Scribes organised documents into numbered chapters this way, and the same verb later came to mean bargaining over terms and drawing up an agreement between parties. That agreement is the root of the modern sense. A set of negotiated terms, arranged point by point, was a capitulation, and the side that accepted such terms gave up. English borrowed the adjective first, and the verb followed. Early on, the adjective "capitulated" was a common way to describe a text divided into chapters or articles, so the legal and literary meanings coexisted for a long time before military surrender dominated. When you capitulate, then, you are in effect accepting a list of terms written by someone else, one heading at a time.

Synonyms: surrendering, yielding, submitting

Antonyms: resisting, fighting, withholding