- Today's Word
Repudiate
rih-PYOO-dee-ayt
Definition
(verb) To reject something or someone with deliberate, formal finality; to refuse to accept or be associated with.
Example
The senator repudiated the endorsement publicly and in writing — making it impossible for anyone to claim she had simply failed to notice it.
Word Origin
Repudiate derives from the Latin repudiare, meaning “to divorce” or “to reject” — from repudium, the formal Roman term for divorce or rejection, possibly from re- (“back”) and pudere (“to be ashamed”). In Roman law, repudiation was the specific legal act by which a husband or wife formally dissolved a marriage — a public, documented rejection with legal consequences. It entered English in the 16th century carrying that same sense of formal, deliberate, and irreversible rejection that goes beyond mere disagreement into something closer to severance.
Fun Fact
In international law, the repudiation of a treaty or debt obligation is one of the most consequential acts a sovereign nation can take. When a government repudiates a debt — formally declaring it will not honor its financial obligations — the consequences ripple through global markets for decades. Argentina’s repudiation of approximately $100 billion in debt in 2001 remains the largest sovereign debt default in history, producing a decade of legal battles, frozen assets, and diplomatic standoffs that continued well into the 2010s. The act of repudiation in international finance is so severe that economists treat it as essentially a last resort — the financial equivalent of burning the bridge you just crossed.
