renaissance

A renaissance is a rebirth: something that had gone quiet coming back to life. With a capital R it means the one everybody thinks of first, the burst of art and learning that ended the Middle Ages in Europe. Michelangelo flat on his back painting a ceiling, Leonardo filling notebooks with flying machines, merchants who had never read Greek paying for translations of it.

The small-r use is alive and everywhere: a town has a renaissance when the shuttered shops fill up again, and vinyl records had a renaissance after everyone had written them off. The word sits in front of nouns as well, as in Renaissance painting or Renaissance Italy, and a Renaissance man is somebody good at a startling number of things at once. Watch the middle of the spelling, -naiss-, with the i tucked in before the double s. The one thing a renaissance needs is a before: something has to have existed and faded, so a brand new industry cannot have one. British speakers say ruh-NAY-sunss, Americans REN-uh-sahns, and both are correct in their own street.

Phrases it lives in

• Renaissance man — someone accomplished in many different fields at once