Skip to content
OneKitly

souvenir

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˌsuː.vəˈnɪə//
  • United States//ˈsu.vəˌnɪɹ//
  • //ˌsoʊ.vəˈnɪ.ə//

An item of sentimental value, that is given or kept to remember an event or location.

noun

  1. 1

    An item of sentimental value, that is given or kept to remember an event or location.

    Back then, nobody knew in the schoolyard / Now then, you have grown up to be this hard / Go then, walk through this world with your heart scarred / You're the souvenir of sadness

    The tourists stuck to the safe confines of the gift shop, where they bought souvenir combs, shot glasses, oversize pencils, and blocks of cedar painted with rhyming poems and shellacked to a high gloss.

Etymology

Unadapted borrowing from French souvenir (literally “memory”). Compare memento.

verb

  1. 1

    To take (something) as a souvenir, especially illicitly, for example during wartime.

    "Doubletime up to the ville and souvenir me one cute orphan, man, but be sure you get a dirty one, a really skuzzy one."

    The word is they're waiting for some blokes who had gone off souveniring before the order was announced.

Forms

plural
souvenirs
past tense
souvenired
past participle
souvenired
present participle
souveniring
third person singular
souvenirs
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).