revenant

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The Word of the Day for June 12 is:

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."




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