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''revenant'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260817185222-00-⌔

revenant - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

revenant (plural revenants)

  • Someone who returns from a long absence.
    • ✤ Synonyms: prodigal, returner
    • ✤ They would not visit this undesirable revenant with his insolent wealth and discreditable origin.1
    • ✤ The undergraduates, our fogey revenant observes, look much as they did.., in outward aspect.2
    • ✤ From this moment on, the hero’s fate is sealed; an attempt to reestablish himself in human society, though initially successful, inevitably fails. The stone tablet exerts an invincible fascination over the revenant, who becomes so withdrawn that his father implores him: […]3
  • A person or thing reborn.
    • ✤ Synonym: phoenix
    • ✤ Sometimes […] semi-identifications could be made on the basis of names. Henry VII’s son Arthur was hailed as a revenant in this way.4
  • A supernatural being that returns from the dead; a zombie or ghost.
    • ✤ Synonyms: apparition, spectre; see also Thesaurus: ghost
    • ✤ For granting even that Religion were dead; that it had died, half-centuries ago, with unutterable Dubois; or emigrated lately, to Alsace, with Necklace-Cardinal Rohan; or that it now walked as goblin revenant with Bishop Talleyrand of Autun; yet does not the Shadow of Religion, the Cant of Religion, still linger?5
    • ✤ Earlier you mentioned a ghost, a revenant with which we may contaminate the Emperor.6
    • ✤ And to a revenant who had lived in body after body, died death after death, evanescence could seem like a dream of peace. But the chimaera could ill afford to let soldiers go.7
    • ✤ If reports from the time are to be believed, 17th-century Poland was awash in revenants —not vampires, exactly, but proto-zombies who harassed the living by drinking their blood or, less disagreeably, stirring up a ruckus in their homes.8

Adjective

revenant (comparative more revenant, superlative most revenant)

  • Returning.
    • ✤ On clear nights when the moon was full, she waited for its shining revenant ghost.9
    • ✤ […] which, in turn, led to the first U.S. vessel to be lost that day, as an Avenger touched down near the destroyer USS Porter, which, shortly thereafter, took a torpedo hit, quite possibly from the Avenger’s weapon deciding that, well, water immersion must surely mean that it should activate. USS Shaw, the revenant survivor of Pearl Harbor, was then forced to rescue the surviving crew of both the Porter and the aircraft before finishing off the stricken Porter with its guns.10

Etymology

19th century. From French revenant, the present participle of revenir (“to return”). Compare revenue.

Pronunciation

  • (General American, Received Pronunciation) IPA: /ˈɹɛvənənt/
  • Audio (Southern England): 🔊

Printed 2026-08-17.

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Footnotes

  1. 1886, Mrs Lynn Linton, Paston Carew viii, as cited in the Oxford English Dictionary, volume 8 part 1, published 1914, page 595: ↩

  2. 1895 August 31, Daily News 4/7, as cited in the Oxford English Dictionary, volume 8 part 1, published 1914, page 595: ↩

  3. 2008, Andrew Cusack, Wanderer in 19th-Century German Literature, Camden House, →ISBN, page 91: ↩

  4. 2007, John Burrow, A History of Histories, Penguin, published 2009, page 184: ↩

  5. 1837, Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History […], volume, London: Chapman and Hall, →OCLC,: ↩

  6. 1969, Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah ‎, published 2008, →ISBN, page 19: ↩

  7. 2011, Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke & Bone, →ISBN: ↩

  8. 2023 September 5, Franz Lidz, “Undying Dread: A 400-Year-Old Corpse, Locked to Its Grave”, in The New York Times ‎, →ISSN: ↩

  9. 1988, Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, Random House, published 2008, page 134: ↩

  10. 2021 February 3, Drachinifel, 14:19 from the start, in Guadalcanal Campaign - Santa Cruz (IJN 2: 2 USN) ‎, archived from the original on 4 December 2022: ↩

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