reprieve

Origin:
1300–50; perhaps conflation of Middle English repreven to reprove, apparently taken in literal sense “to test again” (involving postponement), and Middle English repried (past participle) < Old French reprit (see reprise)

Related forms

re·priev·er, noun

un·re·prieved, adjective

Synonyms
3. See pardon. 5. delay, postponement, stay, deferment.

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World English Dictionary

reprieve (rɪˈpriːv)

—vb
1.	to postpone or remit the punishment of (a person, esp one condemned to death)
2.	to give temporary relief to (a person or thing), esp from otherwise irrevocable harm: the government has reprieved the company with a huge loan

—n
3.	a postponement or remission of punishment, esp of a person condemned to death
4.	a warrant granting a postponement
5.	a temporary relief from pain or harm; respite
6.	the act of reprieving or the state of being reprieved

[C16: from Old French repris (something) taken back, from reprendre to take back, from Latin reprehendere; perhaps also influenced by obsolete English repreve to reprove]

re'prievable

—*adj*

re'priever

—n

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Etymonline

Word Origin & History

reprieve

1571, "take back to prison," from M.E. repryen "to remand, detain" (1494), probably from M.Fr. repris, pp. of reprendre "take back" (see reprise). Meaning "to suspend an impending execution" is recorded from 1596. Sense evolved because being sent back to prison was the alternative

to being executed. The noun is first attested 1598.

Example sentences

He was a cheerful pessimist who never lost sight of the fact that our reprieve

from history may be temporary.

These investigations include pardon, reprieve, and commutation cases.

The president must guard the gate between punishment and reprieve with

vigilance.

But for-profit colleges aren't waiting for a judicial reprieve.

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Related Words

pardon grace

grace

Matching Quote

"He had seen the end of an era, the sunset of the pioneer. He had come upon it when already its glory was nearly spent. So in the buffalo times a traveller used to come upon the embers of a hunter's fire on the prairies, after the hunter was up and gone; the coals would be trampled out, but the ground was warm, and the flattened grass where he had slept and where his pony had grazed, told the story.
This was the very end of the road-making West; the men who had put plains and mountains under the iron harness were old; some were poor, and even the successful ones were hunting for rest and a brief reprieve from death. It was already gone, that age; nothing could ever bring it back. The taste and smell and song of it, the visions those men had seen in the air and followed,—these he had caught in a kind of afterglow in their own faces,—and this would always be his."

-Willa Cather