surrender is to admit that you have been defeated and want to stop fighting, or to give up something or somebody when you are forced to; as a noun it is an act of admitting defeat.
The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary marks the first verb sense intransitive and transitive: "to admit that you have been defeated and want to stop fighting; to allow yourself to be caught, taken prisoner, etc.," with give in as a synonym and the example "The rebel soldiers were forced to surrender." Its second sense, labelled formal, is "to give up something/somebody when you are forced to," with relinquish as a synonym. Oxford's noun entry, uncountable or singular, adds "the fact of allowing yourself to be controlled by something" and "an act of giving something to somebody else even though you do not want to, especially after a battle, etc." It traces the word to "late Middle English (chiefly in legal use): from Anglo-Norman French (from sur- and render)."
Cambridge Dictionary defines the intransitive verb as "to stop fighting and admit defeat" and gives "If you surrender to an experience or emotion, you stop trying to prevent or control it." Its transitive sense is "to give something that is yours to someone else because you have been forced to do so or because it is necessary to do so." Its Business English entry adds "to end an insurance policy early, before its original end date."
Dictionary.com defines the verb used without object as "to give oneself up, as into the power of another; submit or yield," and the noun as "the act or an instance of surrendering." It records the word as "First recorded in 1425–75."