mandate

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. An authoritative command or instruction.
2. n. A command or an authorization given by a political electorate to its representative.
3. n. A commission from the League of Nations authorizing a member nation to administer a territory.
4. n. A region under such administration.
5. n. Law An order issued by a superior court or an official to a lower court.
6. n. Law A contract by which one party agrees to perform services for another without payment.
7. v. To assign (a colony or territory) to a specified nation under a mandate.
8. v. To make mandatory, as by law; decree or require: mandated desegregation of public schools.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. A command; an order, precept, or injunction; a commission.
2. n. An official command addressed by a superior to an inferior, to control his conduct in a specific manner. Specifically
3. n. In early Rom. law (before the doctrines of agency were developed), a trust or commission by which one person, called the mandator, requested another, the mandatarius, to act in his own name and as if for himself in a particular transaction (special mandate), or in all the affairs of the former (general mandate). The mandatarius was the only one recognized as having legal rights and responsibilities as toward third persons in the transactions involved. As between him and the mandator, however, the latter was entitled to all benefit, and bound to indemnity against losses, etc.; but the service was gratuitous.
4. n. In civil law
5. n. A contract of bailment in which a thing is transferred by the mandator to the possession of the mandatory, upon an undertaking of the latter to perform gratuitously some service in reference to it: distinguished from a mere deposit for safe keeping.
6. n. A contract of agency by which the mandator confides a matter of business, or his business generally, to an agent called the mandatary. If the authority or appointment be in writing, the mandate is also called procuration. Mandatary qualification exists where a person induces another to repose credit in a third person; it answers somewhat to our modern letter of credit.
7. To command.
8. To commit (a sermon, speech, etc.) to memory by repeating (it) aloud to one's self before delivery.

Wiktionary

1. n. An official or authoritative command; an order or injunction; a commission; a judicial precept.
2. v. to authorize

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. An official or authoritative command, order, or authorization from a superior official to a subordinate; an order or injunction; a commission; a judicial precept.
2. n. (Politics) An authorization to carry out a specific public policy, given by the electorate to their representatives; -- it is considered to be implied by the election of a candidate by a significant margin after that candidate has campaigned with that policy as a prominent element of the campaign platform.
3. n. Authorization by a multinational body to a nation to administer the government and affairs of a territory, usually a former colony.
4. n. (Canon Law) A rescript of the pope, commanding an ordinary collator to put the person therein named in possession of the first vacant benefice in his collation.
5. n. (Scots Law) A contract by which one employs another to manage any business for him. By the Roman law, it must have been gratuitous.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. a document giving an official instruction or command
2. v. make mandatory
3. v. assign authority to
4. v. assign under a mandate
5. n. the commission that is given to a government and its policies through an electoral victory
6. n. a territory surrendered by Turkey or Germany after World War I and put under the tutelage of some other European power until they are able to stand by themselves