Impunity

How to spell impunity

8 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce impunity

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does impunity mean?

1. nounFreedom from punishment or from the harmful consequences of an action.

Impunity in a sentence

• The company dumped waste into the river with apparent impunity for years.

• Weak enforcement let the gang operate with near total impunity.

Where does impunity come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Impunity comes from the Latin noun impunitas, meaning 'freedom from punishment'. That word was built from the adjective impunis, 'unpunished', which joined the negative prefix in- (here softened to im- before the p, and meaning simply 'not') to poena, the Latin word for a penalty or punishment. The Latin poena itself was borrowed from the Greek poine, which originally meant a blood-price or the money paid in compensation for a killing. English took the word in during the mid-1500s, partly through the French impunité, with the steady meaning of doing wrong and escaping any consequence. The very same poena root is hiding inside the everyday words 'penalty', 'punish', and 'pain', and remembering that the middle of impunity is the 'pun' of 'punish' helps fix the single n and the u in the spelling.

How the word is built

• im- (not)
• pun (from Latin poena, punire: penalty, to punish)
• -ity (noun suffix)