wreak
Formswreaks, wreaking, wreaked
Formswreaks, wreaking, wreaked
Pluralwreaks
- 1To cause or inflict harm or damage, or to vent a harmful feeling such as anger on someone or something.
A single burst pipe can wreak serious damage on an old house.
Rumors of layoffs wreaked havoc with morale across the department.
Similarcause, inflict, unleash
Note
The verb keeps a short list of objects, havoc, damage and devastation among them, and what suffers follows on, in or with: havoc on the harvest, damage in the city. Its past is wreaked, with wrought beside it. The smell verb is reek, so a room reeks of smoke; writing wreaks there is a misspelling.
- 2To inflict vengeance, or to take vengeance on someone who has done a wrong.
The exiled prince returned to wreak vengeance on the lords who had betrayed his father.
their woe / Broods maddening inwardly and scorns to wreak / Itself abroad;
1874, James Thomson, The City of Dreadful NightNote
Older literary English could make the wronged person the object, so that to wreak someone was to avenge them, as in Tennyson's kill the foul thief, and wreak me for my son. The pattern that lasted puts the feeling first and the target after on: Edgar Rice Burroughs writes of those who wreak their poor spite on me.
- 3To take vengeance for a wrong or loss that has been suffered.
The ballad tells of a widow who lived only to wreak her husband's murder.
Come wreak his loss, whom bootless ye complain.
1600, [Torquato Tasso], Godfrey of BulloigneNote
The wrong itself is the object: to wreak a death or a loss is to avenge it, as in Edward Fairfax's 1600 translation of Tasso, come wreak his loss. When what follows the verb is a wrong already suffered, this is the sense; when it is a feeling aimed with on, it is vengeance taken on someone.
Less common meanings
- 4Revenge for a wrong; also, furious passion or deep resentment.
Years of exile had not cooled his wreak against the family that drove him out.
However, no thought touch'd Minerva's mind, That any one should escape his wreak design'd.
1903, George Chapman, Richard Herne ShepherdNote
Though it looks like the verb, the noun came separately, from a northern Middle English variant of wreche, and was only later pulled toward wreak. Old poetry and romance use it in set phrases, with the target after on or upon and the wrong after for: rebels seek wreak upon their king, and Duke William comes to take wreak for a murder.
- 5Punishment dealt out in return for a wrong done.
Of a surety none murdered the damsel but I; take her wreak on me this moment; for, an thou do not thus, I will require it of thee before Almighty Allah.
1885, “The Tale of the Three Apples”, in Sir Richard BurtonNote
Punishment and revenge are hard to pull apart in this word. In Richard Burton's Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, a confessed killer says take her wreak on me: the penalty he asks for is also the dead woman's vengeance. Like its sibling, it is archaic and literary.
- 6To punish or discipline someone, whether by harsh rebuke or by striking them.
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Origins
From Middle English wreken, from Old English wrecan, from Proto-West Germanic *wrekan, from Proto-Germanic *wrekaną, from Proto-Indo-European *wreg- ("push, shove, drive, track down"). It is related through Germanic to Dutch wreken, German rächen and Swedish vräka, through Indo-European to Latin urgēre (the source of English urge), and distantly to English wreck.
From Middle English wreke or wrake, Northern Middle English variants of wreche, later influenced by the other word wreak (etymology 1). Compare Dutch wraak.