- Today's Word
Reprieve
ri-PREEV
Definition
- (noun) A temporary relief or delay from punishment or an unpleasant situation.
- (verb) To grant a postponement or break from something difficult or undesirable.
Example
The student’s unexpected snow day was a much-needed reprieve from final exams.
Fun Fact
The word “reprieve” originally referred to delaying executions, making it a term of life-or-death importance. While today it’s used more broadly—whether for a break from stress or an extension on a deadline—it still carries the sense of a temporary escape from something pressing.
(adjective) Belonging to a different era and jarringly out of place in its current context.
The executive’s insistence on fax machines and printed memos felt deeply anachronistic in an office where everything else ran on AI.
Anachronistic derives from the Greek anachronismos, built from ana- (“against” or “back”) and chronos (“time”). It entered English in the 17th century, initially used by historians and literary critics to describe errors in which a person, object, or custom is placed in the wrong historical period — a clock appearing in a Shakespeare play set in ancient Rome, for instance. Over time it broadened into everyday use to describe anything that feels like a relic of a time that has long since passed.