[ak-uh-leyd, -lahd; ak-uh-leyd, -lahd] 
| 1. | any award, honor, or laudatory notice: The play received accolades from the press. |
| 2. | a light touch on the shoulder with the flat side of the sword or formerly by an embrace, done in the ceremony of conferring knighthood. |
| 3. | the ceremony itself. |
| 4. | Music. a brace joining several staves. |
| 5. | Architecture.
|
| ac·co·lade (āk'ə-lād', -läd') n.
To praise or honor: "His works are invariably accoladed as definitive even as they sparkle and spark" (Malcolm S. Forbes). [French, an embrace, accolade, from accoler, to embrace, from Old French acoler, from Vulgar Latin *accolāre : Latin ad-, ad- + Latin collum, neck; see kwel-1 in Indo-European roots.] Word History: People usually have to stick their necks out to earn accolades, and this is as it should be. In tracing accolade back to its Latin origins, we find that it was formed from the prefix ad-, "to, on," and the noun collum, "neck," which may bring the word collar to mind. From these elements came the Vulgar Latin word *accollāre, which was the source of French accolade, "an embrace." An embrace was originally given to a knight when dubbing him, a fact that accounts for accolade having the technical sense "ceremonial bestowal of knighthood," the sense in which the word is first recorded in English in 1623. |
əˌleɪd
