Skip to content
OneKitly

reaction

nouncommon in dialogue

  • //ɹiˈækʃən//

An action or statement in response to a stimulus or other event.

noun

  1. 1

    An action or statement in response to a stimulus or other event.

    The announcement of the verdict brought a violent reaction.

    You were in the courtroom. What is your reaction?

    When I last tried to eat strawberries I had a terrible allergic reaction.

  2. 2

    A transformation in which one or more substances is converted into another by combination or decomposition.

    In this reaction, the acid and base will neutralize each other, producing a salt.

  3. 3

    Reactionary politics; a period in which reactionary thought or politics is resurgent or dominant.

    And as Europe advanced year by year more deeply into the low featureless plains of reaction, censorship and mediocrity and the pestilential swamps of poverty, unhappiness and oppression, the image of the liberating revolution became ever more luminous.

  4. 4

    Unpurposeful behavior.

  5. 5

    An icon or emoji appended to a posted message by a user to express their feeling about it.

Etymology

Inherited from Middle English reaccion, from Old French reaction, from Latin reāctiō, from the verb reagō, from re- (“again”) + agō (“to act”); more at re-, action; equivalent to react + -ion.

Forms

plural
reactions
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).