Compliance

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /kəmˈplaɪ.əns/

Definitions

1. The act of conforming to rules, standards, or requests made by others
2. The state of meeting established guidelines, obligations, or expectations set by authorities or governing bodies
3. The process of adhering to specified regulations, requirements, or demands imposed by others

Etymology: Compliance is built from "comply" plus the suffix "-ance", and the suffix has a long journey behind it. Its distant ancestors are Proto-Indo-European participle endings, which passed through Italic and Latin forms before the Latin "-antia" was inherited into Old French as "-ance". Middle English then took up the suffix in the form "-aunce" before it settled into the modern "-ance" that English uses for many abstract nouns. The verb "comply" is where the word's meaning comes from. It entered English from the French "complir" or related forms, carrying the sense of fulfilling or completing something. Over time that idea of carrying out what is asked narrowed toward meeting the demands of a rule or an authority, and "compliance" came to name the state of doing exactly that.

Synonyms: obedience, conformity, adherence, submission, agreement

Antonyms: disobedience, defiance, noncompliance