The Word of the Day

revenant \REV-uh-nahng (the final "ng" is not pronounced, but the vowel is nasalized)\ noun : one that returns after death or a long absence

Example sentence: The play is about a family of revenants who come back to their ancestral home after years of political exile.

Did you know? Frightening or friendly, the classic revenant was a ghost -- a specter returned from the dead. Even in figurative uses, death played its hand. When Sir Walter Scott, in his 1828 novel _The Fair Maid of Perth_, used "revenant" in one of the earliest uses of the word in English, he was referring to a criminal who had survived the gallows, who "was cut down and given to his friends before life was extinct, and ... recovered." Eventually, though, we appended a more earthly meaning: a revenant can be a flesh-and-blood returnee when we use it simply to mean a person who shows up after a long absence. We borrowed "revenant" from the French, who created it from their verb "revenir," which means simply "to return," as does its Latin ancestor, "revenire."