"designate themselves" is a grammatically correct phrase and is usable in written English.
You can use it in situations when someone is assigning a specific status or role for themselves. For example: "The members of the team designated themselves to complete the project by next week."
Meglenoromanians designate themselves with the Macedonian form Vla (plural Vlaš) in their own language.
[New York Post] Councilman David Greenfield of Brooklyn has proposed "Leiby's Law," which would allow businesses to designate themselves as havens for lost children.
Indie fans designate themselves as the anointed ones, who, applying their puritan principles of authenticity, can recognise true music in contrast to false idolatry.
Societies along such a continuum may continue to designate themselves as either capitalist or socialist, but they are likely to reveal as many similarities as differences in their solutions to economic problems.
A bill of rights for Northern Ireland would end the need for parties in the assembly to designate themselves solely as unionist or nationalist, the SDLP leader Mark Durkan predicted this weekend.
Jeffrey A. Goldstein, the Treasury undersecretary for domestic finance, finds the arguments so familiar that he has opened some meetings by asking the firms if they would like to designate themselves as systemically important.
In polls, only 30percentto40percentcent of Americans say they have designated themselves as donors on their driver's licenses or on state-run donor registries.
Because of certain views on being "called to holiness," members of many sects have designated themselves as "the saints"—from Oliver Cromwell's "saints" in 17th-century England to the Mormon "latter-day saints" from the 19th to the 21st century.
Today's kitchens are increasingly unwilling to engage in any sort of dialogue at all with their guests, designating themselves as the final authorities on what diners should and should not want to eat.
What it found, according to Mr. Harrison, was that in recent years 25.2percentt of the people who described themselves as both black and white considered themselves white; 46.9 percent who said they were white and Asian thought of themselves as white, and 80.9percentt who designated themselves as white and Indian believed themselves to be white.
Jack Boyd New York, March 6, 2008 To the Editor: You deserve credit for spotlighting a longstanding urban inequity: while many honest motorists ply the streets daily, foraging for legal parking places, others park most anywhere -- whether or not on city business -- displaying genuine or bogus placards, designating themselves for special treatment.
