Children and upbringing

The fourth entry is a inscrição, and the English word it summons is the one word that will not do. « Inscription » has narrowed to writing cut into a hard surface or written by hand into the front of a book: the inscription on a gravestone, on a coin, on a war memorial, the inscription an author leaves above the title page. It never means signing up for anything. What a inscrição does on this page is exactly that, and English divides the job between two other nouns. « Registration » is the administrative act of being entered on a list, and it is what a nursery, a club or a waiting list asks for. « Enrolment » is the fuller word for joining a school or a course, and it carries the idea of becoming a member rather than merely being recorded. The verbs follow the same split: one registers a birth and enrols a child. All three nouns descend from the same Latin inscribere, to write in, so the family resemblance is real and useless — the English heir went off to the stonemason and left the office work to its cousins.