Other forms: reprieves
A reprieve is a delay or cancelling of a punishment. Grant a reprieve, a last-minute reprieve, a temporary reprieve.
Strictly it postpones rather than cancels, and a pardon is the thing that ends the sentence — though in ordinary use the two blur. Figuratively a reprieve is any stay of something bad, as when a threatened shop or railway line is saved for now.
1nounreprieveA delay or cancelling of a punishment.
“The prisoner was granted a reprieve just hours before his execution.”
reprieve is a delay.
Middle English repryen meant to remand or detain, from Old French reprendre, to take back.
Proto-Indo-European
*gʰed-
Middle French
repris
Middle English
repryen — to remand, detain
English, today
reprieve
Built from
First use appears c. 1513 in the writings of Robert Fabyan. In the sense of “to take back to prison”, from Middle English repryen (“to remand, detain”) (1494), possibly from Middle French repris, in the form of reprendre (“take back”); a cognate to reprise. The sense has become generalized, but does retain connotations of punishment and execution. The noun's first use appears c. 1592.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA