Prepossession is a prejudice or a preconceived idea about something. You might be accused of prepossession if you decided you were going to dislike your new job before you'd even started working there.
- Pronunciation: / ,pripə'sɛʃən/
- English description: an opinion formed beforehand without adequate evidence
- Synonyms: preconception
- Chinese Translation: 偏爱(pian1 ai4)
- Spanish Translation: preocupación
- ORIGIN: When you've got a strong opinion about a subject — or a person — despite having little information or direct experience, that's prepossession. Your prepossession on the subject of cats might make it hard for you to be enthusiastic about your roommate's new kitten, for example. The obsolete verb prepossess originally meant "to get possession of beforehand." By the 1630's, it came to mean "to possess a person beforehand with a feeling or idea," usually in a positive sense.
EXAMPLE SENTENCE:
- A learning of the mind; propensity or prepossession toward an object or view, not leaving the mind indifferent; bent inclination.
- A word had been dropped here and there--with care; the truth had been told to some, the prepossessions of others had been consulted.
*New word description, story and part of "EXAMPLE SENTENCE" are cited in Vocabulary