Other forms: reputations
A reputation is what people generally believe about somebody or something. A good reputation, damage a reputation, the restaurant has a reputation.
It is countable and takes for: a reputation for honesty, a reputation for being difficult. Used with no qualifier, have a reputation usually implies a bad one, which is worth knowing before saying it about somebody. Note live up to your reputation, and the legal term defamation, which is the wrong done to a reputation. A reputation takes years to build and, as everybody says, an afternoon to lose.
1nounreputationWhat people generally believe about somebody or something.
“The place has a reputation for being expensive.”
reputation is a public judgement.
Latin reputatio meant a reckoning or a thinking over, from reputare — re-, again, plus putare, to think or count, the same verb behind compute and dispute. A reputation is what people have worked out about you.
Proto-Indo-European
*pewH-
Latin
reputātiō — consideration, thinking over
Middle French
reputation
Anglo-Norman
reputacion,reputacioun
Middle English
reputacion,reputacioun,reputation,reputatioun
English, today
reputation
Built from
14c. "credit, good reputation", from Middle English reputacion,reputacioun,reputation,reputatioun, from Anglo-Norman reputacion,reputacioun, Middle French reputation (French réputation), and their etymon Latin reputātiō (“consideration, thinking over”), noun of action from past participle stem of reputō (“reflect upon, reckon, count over”), from the prefix re- (“again”) + putō (“reckon, consider”). by surface analysis, repute + -ation. Displaced native hlīsa
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA