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surrender

verbnouncommon in dialogue

  • //səˈɹɛndə(ɹ)//
  • //səˈɹɛndɚ//

To give up into the power, control, or possession of another.

verb

  1. 1

    To give up into the power, control, or possession of another.

  2. 2

    To yield (a town, a fortification, etc.) to an enemy.

  3. 3

    To give oneself up into the power of another, especially as a prisoner; to submit or give in.

    Don't shoot! I surrender!

  4. 4

    To give up possession of; to yield; to resign.

    to surrender a right, privilege, or advantage

  5. 5

    To yield (oneself) to an influence, emotion, passion, etc.

    to surrender oneself to grief, to despair, to indolence, or to sleep

  6. 6

    To abandon (one's hand of cards) and recover half of the initial bet.

  7. 7

    For a policyholder, to voluntarily terminate an insurance contract before the end of its term, usually with the expectation of receiving a surrender value.

Etymology

From Middle English surrendren, from Old French surrendre, from sur- + rendre (“render”). Displaced native Old English on hand gān.

noun

  1. 1

    An act of surrendering, submission into the possession of another; a feeling of abandonment and resignation; the deliberate cessation of struggle over outcomes.

  2. 2

    The yielding or delivery of a possession in response to a demand.

  3. 3

    The yielding of the leasehold estate by the lessee to the landlord, so that the tenancy for years merges in the reversion and no longer exists.

Etymology

From Middle English surrendre, from Anglo-Norman surrendre, infinitive as noun. Displaced native Old English handgang.

Forms

plural
surrenders
past tense
surrendered
past participle
surrendered
present participle
surrendering
third person singular
surrenders
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).