resort
Pluralresorts
Verbresorts, resorting, resorted
Pluralresorts
Formsresorts, resorting, resorted
- 1A place where people go for recreation, especially one offering lodging, entertainment, and a relaxing environment.
The island resort offers snorkeling, spa treatments, and beachfront dining.
After the merger, the company acquired two golf resorts in Arizona.
Note
The everyday modern sense draws on a verb of movement. Old French resortir meant 'to return, have recourse', and a resort here is a place people go, and go back to, for pleasure. It usually names its setting or activity, as in island resort or golf resort. It is close kin to the old word for a haunt, which named any place a person habitually went.
- 2A person or thing one can turn to for safety or protection; a refuge or recourse.
With negotiations stalled, legal action became the union's only resort.
For the sailors caught in the storm, the sheltered cove was a welcome resort.
Similarrecourse, refuge, option, alternative, expedient
Note
The noun keeps the construction of the verb of recourse: one has resort to violence, just as one resorts to it. Both carry the same suggestion that the thing turned to is taken up because other options have failed. Shakespeare still uses the noun freely in Timon of Athens: 'forbid him her resort'.
- 3To have recourse to something, now especially out of necessity or frustration.
Negotiators hope neither side will resort to threats.
Unable to reach a deal, the workers resorted to a strike.
Note
This is the living verb, and it nearly always comes with to and a hint that better options have run out. One resorts to threats, to a strike, or, like Dickens's character in A Tale of Two Cities, to a pint of wine for consolation. Though intransitive, it can be made passive through its preposition: Railway Magazine wrote in 1950 of 'the rack resorted to'.
- 4To fall back to a former state or condition; to revert.
When the levee failed, the river resorted to its former channel.
Without regular mowing, the lawn will resort to meadow within a year.
Note
The literal 'falling back' survives best in old legal prose. In 1713 Matthew Hale wrote of an inheritance that 'never resorted to the Mother', meaning it did not pass back to her line. In modern use the sense is hard to separate from the verb of recourse, since falling back on pen and paper is also resorting to it. Where reverting is meant, revert is clearer.
- 5To make one's way to a place; to go to it.
Pilgrims resort to the shrine each spring.
In the evenings, scholars resorted to the coffeehouse to debate.
Similargo (entry), repair, flock, head
Note
The verb of going pictures people converging on a place. Tyndale's New Testament of 1526 has 'much people resorted unto him', with unto where modern English uses to. It suits pilgrims, crowds and regulars, and it is the motion behind both the holiday destination and the old word for a haunt.
- 6An administrative subdivision of Suriname; each of the country's districts is divided into resorts.
Census takers visited every household in the resort last month.
The district of Paramaribo is divided into several resorts, each with its own council.
Note
This administrative term has a precise place in Suriname's hierarchy: districts are the larger units, and resorts are the divisions within them. In this use the word is neutral government vocabulary, at home in census and council contexts. It has nothing to do with holidays, so a resort of Paramaribo is a part of the district, not a hotel in it.
- 7Sayree-SORTUS/ˌɹiˈsɔɹt/UK/ˌɹiːˈsɔːt/Alternative spelling of re-sort.
After the import, we had to resort the entire customer database.
The spreadsheet rows resort whenever a new entry arrives.
Note
This is a different word that shares the spelling: re- plus sort, meaning to sort again, used with or without an object. The hyphenated re-sort is preferred because the closed form collides with the recourse and holiday senses. Its forms make the clash worse: resorts, resorting and resorted are spelled exactly like those of the verb of recourse.
- 8Sayree-SORTUS/ˌɹiˈsɔɹt/UK/ˌɹiːˈsɔːt/Alternative spelling of re-sort.
A quick resort of the spreadsheet fixed the duplicate entries.
The warehouse inventory got a complete resort after the audit.
Note
The act of sorting again is most at home in computing. Dr. Dobb's Journal in 1991 sets 'an initial sort' beside 'a resort', and placed next to sort, the closed spelling is easy to read. Elsewhere the hyphen is safer, because it avoids the clash with the holiday resort that also troubles the verb 'sort again'.
Less common meanings
- 9A place that someone visits habitually; a haunt.
The riverside garden was her constant resort in fine weather.
The tavern on Fleet Street served as the poets' nightly resort.
Note
A poet's word now, and no longer a living one. Milton's Il Penseroso, written before 1645, places its speaker 'far from all resort of mirth'. Read that way today, the word is a deliberate archaism. In ordinary prose, haunt says the same thing without leaving the reader picturing a holiday destination.
- 10Active power or movement; the spring or elastic force of a thing.
The blade bent under his thumb and returned with a lively resort.
Years of damp had robbed the crossbow of its resort.
Note
This sense is a separate borrowing, from French ressort, and it shares only its spelling with the other senses. Francis Bacon's essay 'Of Cunning' (1625) speaks of the 'resorts and falls of business': the springs that set affairs in motion, set against the points where they drop. The sense is obsolete. A modern writer after this idea would say spring or driving force.
Showing meanings only.
Practice
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Origins
From Middle English resorten, from Old French resortir ("to fall back, return, resort, have recourse, appeal"), a back-formation from sortir ("to go out").
Formed from the prefix re- and the word sort.
From French ressort.