Punish

How to spell punish

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce punish

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does punish mean?

1. verbTo impose a penalty on someone for an offence or wrongdoing.

Punish in a sentence

• The new policy will punish drivers who park illegally.

• Teachers can no longer punish pupils with physical force.

Where does punish come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb punire, meaning 'to inflict a penalty on' or 'to take vengeance for', which was built on the noun poena, meaning 'penalty' or 'punishment'. That same poena lies behind the English words 'penal', 'penalty', and even 'pain', since pain was once understood as the suffering imposed as a penalty. The Latin verb passed into Old French as punir, and English borrowed it in the early 1300s, taking the form punish from the lengthened stem puniss- that appeared in many of the French verb's conjugations. The -ish ending you see here is the same suffix found in 'finish', 'perish', and 'cherish', all of which entered English from French verbs in the same way. Knowing that the -ish ending is a borrowed grammatical piece, not part of any root, helps explain why there is no double letter and only a single s before it.

How the word is built

• pun- (from Latin poena: penalty, punishment)
• -ish (verb-forming suffix from Old French -iss-)