mandate

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun An authoritative command or instruction.
• noun A command or authorization given by a political electorate to the winner of an election.
• noun A commission from the League of Nations authorizing a member nation to administer a territory.
• noun A region under such administration.
• noun Law The specific directive issued by a reviewing court to a lower court, as in requiring the lower court to enter a new judgment or to conduct further proceedings consistent with the reviewing court's ruling.
• transitive verb To assign (a colony or territory) to a specified nation under a mandate of the League of Nations.
• transitive verb To make mandatory, as by law; decree or require.

from The Century Dictionary.

• To command.
• To commit (a sermon, speech, etc.) to memory by repeating (it) aloud to one's self before delivery.
• noun A command; an order, precept, or injunction; a commission.
• noun An official command addressed by a superior to an inferior, to control his conduct in a specific manner.
• noun 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).
• noun In civil law
• noun 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.
• noun A contract of agency by which the mandator confides a matter of business, or his business generally, to an agent called the mandatary.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun An official or authoritative command, order, or authorization from a superior official to a subordinate; an order or injunction; a commission; a judicial precept.
• noun (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.
• noun Authorization by a multinational body to a nation to administer the government and affairs of a territory, usually a former colony.
• noun (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.
• noun (Scots Law) A contract by which one employs another to manage any business for him. By the Roman law, it must have been gratuitous.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun An official or authoritative command; an order or injunction; a commission; a judicial precept.
• verb to authorize

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun a document giving an official instruction or command
• verb make mandatory
• verb assign authority to
• verb assign under a mandate
• noun the commission that is given to a government and its policies through an electoral victory
• noun 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