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retaliation

nounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ɹiˌtæl.iˈeɪ.ʃən//
  • United States//ɹɪˌtæl.iˈeɪ.ʃən//
  • United States//ɹə-//
  • United States//ɹi-//
  • United States//-ʃɪn//

Violent or otherwise punitive response to an act of harm or perceived injustice; a hitting back; revenge.

noun

  1. 1

    Violent or otherwise punitive response to an act of harm or perceived injustice; a hitting back; revenge.

    Hamas knew there would be massive retaliations.

Etymology

Etymology tree English retaliate Proto-Indo-European *-tis Proto-Indo-European *-Hō Proto-Indo-European *-tiHō Proto-Italic *-tiō Latin -tiō Latin -ātiōlbor. Old French -ationbor. Middle English -acioun English -ation English -ion English retaliation From retaliate + -ion.

Forms

plural
retaliations
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).