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vengeful

UK/ˈvɛnʒ.fəl/US/ˈvɛnʒ.fəl/
adjectiveC2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechneutral

Vengeful means hungry to pay somebody back for a wrong. Not angry — planning.

The patience is what makes the word frightening, since a vengeful person is prepared to wait. It describes people, gods and, in fiction, ghosts. The noun is vengeance, which is grander and more biblical than revenge and belongs to declarations rather than to squabbles. Vindictive is the close neighbour and is nastier and pettier, since a vindictive person takes revenge out of all proportion to the offence.

Definitions of vengeful

  1. 1adjectivevengefulDetermined to take revenge for a wrong.C2

    “He was not a vengeful man, whatever they said about him.”

Where it comes from

From venge + ful.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 23 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

vengeful in the wild

  • Odysseus protected him from vengeful Cephallenians who wanted to kill him.

    Eupeithes

  • Wewe Gombel is a female supernatural being or vengeful ghost in Javanese mythology.

    Wewe Gombel

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.