To consign means to send something or someone to a particular place or fate, often permanently. When a museum consigns an old artifact to storage, it moves the piece out of public view, perhaps forever. When a library consigns damaged books to the recycling bin, those books are finished serving readers.

The word carries a sense of finality and distance. You might consign an outgrown winter coat to a thrift store, or consign old toys to the attic. Writers sometimes say that historical events consign certain practices to the past: the invention of the calculator consigned slide rules to obsolescence.

In business, consign has a specific meaning: to give goods to a store to sell on your behalf. If you consign your old baseball cards to a collectibles shop, the shop displays them and pays you only if they sell. This arrangement is called selling items on consignment.

The word often appears in the phrase “consign to history,” meaning something is finished and won't return. When steam engines replaced horses for transportation, society essentially consigned horses as the primary mode of travel to history. Consigning suggests a one-way trip: once something is consigned, it rarely comes back.