the.com/adoption

means The legal and emotional process of taking someone else's child (or sometimes an adult) permanently into your family as your own.

from From Latin adoptare, built from ad- ('toward') plus optare ('to choose, wish for') — the same optare that gives us 'option.' So an adopted child is, etymologically, a chosen one: the Romans used adoptio specifically for the legal act of taking a person into a new family line, often to secure an heir, and the word passed through French into English still carrying that sense of deliberate, formal choosing rather than accident of birth.