Other forms: punished, punishing, punishes
To punish is to make somebody suffer a penalty for doing wrong. Punish the offender, severely punished, punished for something he did not do.
The pattern is punish somebody for something. It also describes a demanding schedule or condition — a punishing pace, a punishing week — where nobody has done anything wrong at all. Note punishment, the noun, and corporal punishment and capital punishment, which are the technical terms for physical punishment and the death penalty. The phrase the punishment should fit the crime comes from Gilbert and Sullivan.
1verbpunishTo make somebody suffer a penalty for doing wrong.
“They punished the whole class for one boy's joke.”
synonyms: penalise, discipline
2verbtreatTo treat harshly or put under strain.
“The road punishes anything with soft suspension.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
punish is a way of penalising.
Latin punire comes from poena, a penalty — the same root as pain, penal and penalty. In Latin, poena originally meant the compensation paid for a killing, so the whole family began in negotiation rather than in suffering.
Proto-Indo-European
*kʷey-
Latin
puniō — to inflict punishment upon
Middle English
punischen
English, today
punish
Built from
From Middle English punischen, from Anglo-Norman -, Old French - puniss-, stem of some of the conjugated forms of punir, from Latin puniō (“to inflict punishment upon”), from poena (“punishment, penalty”); see pain. Displaced wītnian and (mostly, in this sense) wrecan.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA