Revenge

How to spell revenge

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce revenge

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does revenge mean?

1. nounThe act of harming or paying back someone in return for a wrong they have done.
2. verbTo inflict harm in return for an injury or wrong done to oneself or another.

Revenge in a sentence

• noun

  He plotted revenge against the colleague who took credit for his work.

• verb

  The captain swore to revenge the defeat in the next match.

• noun

  The film follows a detective who seeks revenge after years of betrayal.

• verb

  They vowed to revenge the insult to their family name.

Where does revenge come from?

Language of origin: French

This word travelled into English from Old French at the end of the 1300s, in the form revenger, built from the prefix re-, used here as an intensifier, and vengier, meaning 'to avenge'. That French verb traces back to the Latin vindicare, which literally meant 'to claim, to lay legal claim to' and then came to mean 'to punish or take vengeance'. The same Latin root sits inside the related English words 'vengeance', 'avenge' and 'vindicate', all of which still circle the idea of righting a wrong. The noun and the verb developed side by side, with the sense of paying back an injury settling firmly into English by the late medieval period. The spelling trap lives in the middle: the soft 'g' is spelled with a plain 'g' before 'e', not a 'j' or 'dg', and the second vowel is an unstressed 'e' that is easy to drop.

How the word is built

• re- (intensive prefix)
• venge (to avenge, from Latin vindicare 'to claim, punish')