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penal

adjectiveattested in dialogue

  • //ˈpiːnəl//

Of or relating to punishment.

adjective

  1. 1

    Of or relating to punishment.

    penal servitude

  2. 2

    Subject to punishment; punishable.

    a penal offence

  3. 3

    Serving as a place of punishment.

    a penal colony

  4. 4

    Exorbitant.

    a penal rate of interest

Etymology

From Old French peinal, from Medieval Latin penalis, from Latin poenalis, from poena (“punishment”), from Ancient Greek ποινή (poinḗ, “punishment”), from Proto-Indo-European *kʷoynéh₂.

The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).