Vindication

1. n. The claiming a thing as one’s own; the asserting of a right or title in, or to, a thing.
2. n. The act of vindicating, or the state of being vindicated; defense; justification against denial or censure; as, the vindication of opinions; his vindication is complete.

The word meanings were obtained from OPTED(The Online Plain Text English Dictionary), which is based on “The Project Gutenberg Etext of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary” which is in turn based on the 1913 US Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (See Project Gutenburg), as a text file.