Word of the Day Archive
Friday August 9, 2002
revenant \REV-uh-nuhnt\
, noun:
One who returns after death (as a ghost) or after a long absence.
Lazarus, as a revenant, is often used by the religious romance-writers of the middle ages as a vehicle for their conceptions of the lower world.
-- R. C. Trench, Notes on the Miracles of Our Lord
He pale, immobile like a revenant himself, looked sometimes out of the window, sometimes closed his eyes.
-- D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love
The folklore of the Irish countryside too, with its hauntings, revenants and changelings... was an integral part of everyday awareness, even in the middle-class world of Yeats's childhood.
-- Terence Brown, The Life of W. B. Yeats
Revenant is from French revenir, "to return," which is also the source of the word revenue, "that which returns from an investment."
Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for revenant
