Repression

How to spell repression

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce repression

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does repression mean?

1. nounThe act of using force or authority to control, restrain, or subdue people or behaviour.
2. nounThe mental process of keeping distressing thoughts, memories, or impulses out of conscious awareness.

Repression in a sentence

• The regime answered the protests with brutal repression.

• The therapist explained how repression can bury a painful memory for years.

• Decades of political repression left the population fearful of speaking openly.

• His constant calm masked a lifetime of emotional repression.

Where does repression come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Repression comes from the Latin verb reprimere, meaning 'to press back' or 'to hold down', formed from the prefix re-, meaning 'back', and premere, meaning 'to press'. The same premere lies behind a whole family of English words, including 'press', 'pressure', 'depress', and 'compress', which is why the double 's' in the middle feels familiar once you connect it to 'press'. The Latin past participle was repressus, and from it Latin built the noun repressio for the act of checking or restraining something. English took the word in through Old French around the 1500s, first in the sense of forcibly putting down a revolt or holding an impulse in check. In the early twentieth century Freud's psychoanalytic writing gave it a second life, using it for the mind pushing unwelcome thoughts out of conscious awareness. Keeping the 'press' root in mind is the surest cure for the spelling, since the trap is mainly the single 'p' against the double 's'.

How the word is built

• re- (back)
• press (from Latin premere/pressare: to press)
• -ion (noun of action)