Punishment

How to spell punishment

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce punishment

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does punishment mean?

1. nounA penalty imposed on someone as a consequence of an offence or wrongdoing.

Punishment in a sentence

• The judge decided the punishment should fit the seriousness of the crime.

• Losing his weekend privileges was the punishment for missing the deadline.

Where does punishment come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb punire, meaning 'to inflict a penalty on' or 'to chastise', which itself grew from poena, the word for a penalty or fine. Latin poena travelled into Old French as the verb punir, and English took the verb 'punish' from the Old French stem puniss- during the 1300s, which is why we have that -ish ending rather than -ize. The noun 'punishment' was then formed in English by adding the French-derived suffix -ment, which marks the act or the result of an action. The same poena root quietly survives in the modern words 'pain', 'penalty', and 'penal', all of them carrying the idea of suffering imposed as a consequence. The spelling trap sits in the middle: writers reach for a double letter or insert a stray e, but it is a plain single n and a single s, with the soft -ish stem doing the work.

How the word is built

• pun- (from Latin punire: to punish)
• -ish (verb-forming via French)
• -ment (noun suffix: act or result of)