Other forms: refused, refuses, refusing
To refuse is to say no and mean it. The cash machine refuses your card, a toddler refuses to put his shoes on, a neighbour refuses to move his car off your drive.
You refuse a thing — an offer, a request, permission — or you refuse to do something, with a to-infinitive after it. The passive runs all through official life: she was refused entry, his visa was refused. The noun is refusal, and a flat refusal is one with nothing soft around it. Refuse is blunter than decline: you decline an invitation politely, you refuse to sign. There is also a second word spelled the same but stressed on the first syllable, REF-yooss, meaning rubbish — refuse collection, household refuse — and the two have nothing to do with each other.
1verbrefuseTo say no to something offered, asked for or demanded, or to be unwilling to do it.~79%
“She refused the money three times before she finally took it.”
2nounrubbishRubbish; waste material thrown out to be collected.~21%
“Household refuse is collected on Tuesday mornings.”
synonyms: rubbish, waste, garbage
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 19 sentences found in the wild and placed 19 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: decline
English had its own word for this once: wernen. It faded out, probably because it sounded too much like warnen, to warn, and late Middle English took refusé from Middle French instead — the past participle of refuser. The borrowed word won so completely that wernen vanished.
Proto-Indo-European
*ǵʰewd-
Middle French
refusé
English, today
refuse
Built from
Borrowed into late Middle English - from Middle French refusé, past participle of refuser (“to refuse”). Displaced native Middle English wernen (“to refuse”) likely due to the similar sounding Middle English warnen
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA