agreement

Etymology

From Middle English agrement, agreement, from Old French agrement, agreement. Morphologically agree + -ment.

noun

1. (countable) An understanding between entities to follow a specific course of conduct.
   Coordinate term: conspiracy
   to enter an agreement; the UK and US negotiators nearing agreement; he nodded his agreement.
   Hidden behind thickets of acronyms and gorse bushes of detail, a new great game is under way across the globe.[…]The current power play consists of an extraordinary range of countries simultaneously sitting down to negotiate big free trade and investment agreements. 2013-07-19, Timothy Garton Ash, “Where Dr Pangloss meets Machiavelli”, in The Guardian Weekly, volume 189, number 6, page 18
2. (uncountable) A state whereby several parties share a view or opinion; the state of not contradicting one another.
   The results of my experiment are in agreement with those of Michelson and with the law of General Relativity.
3. (uncountable, law) A legally binding contract enforceable in a court of law.
4. (uncountable, linguistics, grammar) Rules that exist in many languages that force some parts of a sentence to be used or inflected differently depending on certain attributes of other parts.
   Having clarified what we mean by ‘Personʼ and ‘Numberʼ, we can now return to our earlier observation that a finite I is inflected not only for Tense, but also for Agreement. More particularly, I inflects for Person and Number, and must ‘agreeʼ with its Subject, in the sense that the Person/Number features of I must match those of the Subject. 1988, Andrew Radford, chapter 6, in Transformational grammar: a first course, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, page 306
5. (obsolete, chiefly in the plural) An agreeable quality.
   Her nymph-like features such agreements have / That I could venture with her to the grave …. 1650, John Donne, Elegie XVII