respects

1. 1
   noun

   Formal expressions of regard for someone who has died, often offered along with condolences to other mourners.

   Hundreds of neighbors lined the street to pay their respects as the procession passed.

   He stopped by the wake to offer his respects to the widow and her children.

   Similarcondolences

   Note

   Mourning gives the word a fixed shape: you pay your respects, with a possessive, and the noun stays in the plural. The phrase often sharpens with last or final, as in pay your last respects to her grandmother. That adjective casts the gesture as the final courtesy owed to the dead, offered at a funeral or wake.

2. 2
   noun

   Plural of respect.

   The proposal improves on the previous draft in important respects.

   Her argument was convincing in most respects, though a few points needed work.

   Note

   This plural usually means "aspects," not "esteem." Admiration and high regard are uncountable, so they seldom take an -s. The countable sense of a particular feature or detail is the one that pluralizes naturally, which is why the form clusters in phrases like in many respects and in several respects. The plural of regard for the dead is the mourners' phrase, a fixed expression of its own.

3. 3
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present indicative of respect.

   The new manager respects everyone's opinion before making a decision.

   She respects boundaries that others tend to ignore.

   Note

   It shares its spelling with the noun plural, and only position tells them apart: she respects boundaries, but in many respects. As a verb it carries the lemma's full range: esteeming a person, observing a rule or right, abiding by an agreement. More rarely it means relating to or being concerned with something, while the old meaning "regards, deems" is now obsolete.

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