In engineering, the term acquisition has the following meanings:

1. In satellite communications, the process of locking tracking equipment on a signal from a communications satellite.

2. The process of achieving synchronization.

3. In servo systems, the process of entering the boundary conditions that will allow the servo loop to capture the signal and achieve lock-on.

Source: from Federal Standard 1037C and from MIL-STD-188

Mergers and acquisitions, takeover, in business, acquisition is when one company purchases another.

Acquisition is an open source based peer-to-peer Gnutella client for Mac OS X. It highlights files in the user's iTunes library.