The phrase "assign meaning" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it when you want to talk about attaching a reason, significance, or purpose to something, or changing the interpretation of something. For example, "We are working to assign meaning to these old documents in order to better understand the history of our city."
My aunts and uncles were quick to assign meaning to her death.
Negotiated and defined in the present, memory shapes how individuals, groups, or institutions perceive themselves, and how they assign meaning to the landscapes around them.
Based on a systematic literature review, this paper summarizes the empirical evidence on how different ethno-cultural groups use, perceive, prefer, and assign meaning to urban nature.
We assign meaning to our experiences, which in turn makes them feel good or bad.
The postmodern individual is free not only to make his choices, but also to assign meaning to them.
Failure is relative and when you assign meaning to something that happens, you alone define that circumstance.
Whether the bizarre hand-life pattern is really paranormal remains to be seen, but it could just be an example of "pariedolia," a word that means assigning meaning to patterns that are actually just visual "noise".
It is when words are assigned meaning that they become useful as vehicles to express ideas or to identify tangible things in our environment.
Though many researchers have found a connection between giving and happiness, Baumeister argues that this connection is due to how one assigns meaning to the act of giving.
The complex nature of how bodily sensations are assigned meaning as symptoms should be further integrated into the knowledge produced in symptom studies.
They did this by selecting three transcripts, re-reading them, assigning meaning units to each response and codes to each meaning unit while also taking notes on emerging sub-themes.
