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remorse

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ɹɪˈmɔː(ɹ)s//
  • United States//ɹɪˈmɔɹs//

A feeling of regret or sadness for doing wrong or sinning.

noun

  1. 1

    A feeling of regret or sadness for doing wrong or sinning.

    In criminal proceedings, empirical studies have shown that remorse plays an important role in observers’ judgments of defendants.

    Failure, disgrace, poverty, sorrow, despair, suffering, tears even, the broken words that come from lips in pain, remorse that makes one walk on thorns, conscience that condemns . . . —all these were things of which I was afraid.

  2. 2

    obsoleteSorrow; pity; compassion.

    This is the bloodiest shame, The wildest savagery, the vilest stroke, That ever wall-eyed wrath or staring rage Presented to the tears of soft remorse.

Etymology

First attested circa 14th century as Middle English remors, from Old French remors, from Medieval Latin remorsus, from Latin remordeō (“to torment, vex”, literally “to bite back”), from re- + mordeō (“to bite”). More at remord.

verb

  1. 1

    To experience remorse or sorrow; to regret.

    And if we look abroad, to take a view of men as they are, we shall find that they remorse in one place, for doing or omitting that which others, in another place, think they merit by.

    When they have accepted their advice and have some upleasant experience then they remorse.

    Then with godly sorrow they remorse with a humble heart, and they repent.

Forms

plural
remorses
past tense
remorsed
past participle
remorsed
present participle
remorsing
third person singular
remorses
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).