Other forms: regrets, regretted, regretting
To regret something is to wish you had never done it. The message you sent at one in the morning, the flat you didn't buy, the second helping.
Regret is a noun as well, and a whole life can be lived with one regret sitting in the middle of it. Watch the two verb patterns, because they say different things: you regret doing something, which is sorrow about the past, but you regret to say something, which is a warning that bad news is coming. We regret to inform you is the cold opening of every rejection letter. In the plural it becomes a polite refusal — she sent her regrets and stayed home. And regret is a feeling, not an apology: telling someone you regret it is thinner than telling them you are sorry.
1verbregretTo wish you had not done something, or that things had gone differently.~15%
“She regretted selling the piano the moment the van pulled away.”
synonyms: rue
2verbsorryTo say politely that you are sorry about the bad news you are giving.~2%
“We regret to inform you that the position has been filled.”
3nounremorseThe sad feeling of wishing you had acted differently.~81%
“He talked about that summer with real regret.”
synonyms: remorse, contrition
4nounrefusalA polite refusal of an invitation, used in the plural.~2%
“She sent her regrets to the wedding and posted a present instead.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 13 sentences found in the wild and placed 13 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
regret is a feeling of sorrow.
Regret came into Middle English as regretten, taken from Old French regreter, to lament. Underneath the French sit a Frankish word, grātan, and a Proto-Germanic one, grētaną, both meaning simply to weep, and behind those a Proto-Indo-European root ǵʰreh₁d- for making a sound. The re- on the front turns plain weeping into weeping over something already done. Its Old English cousin is greet, which in the north once meant to cry.
Old French
regreter
Middle English
regretten
English, today
regret
Built from
From Middle English regretten, from Old French regreter, from und + re-. From Middle English regretten, regreten, from Old French regreter, regrater (“to lament”), from re- + greter, grater (“to weep”), from Frankish grātan (“to weep, mourn, lament”), from Proto-Germanic grētaną (“to weep”), from Proto-Indo-European ǵʰreh₁d- (“to sound”); and Frankish greutan (“to cry, weep”), from Proto-Germanic greutaną (“to weep, cry”), from Proto-Indo-European gʰrewd- (“to weep, be sad”), equivalent to re- + greet. Cognate with Old High German grāzan (“to cry”), Old English grǣtan (“to weep, greet”), Old English grēotan (“to weep, lament”), Old Norse gráta (“to weep, groan”), Gothic 𐌲𐍂𐌴𐍄𐌰𐌽 (“to weep”). More at greet.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA