penalty.
A legal sentence.
Meaning & usage
A legal sentence.
The penalty for his crime was to do hard labor.
A punishment for violating rules of procedure.
A payment forfeited for an early withdrawal from an account or an investment.
In sports: A direct free kick from the penalty spot, taken after a defensive foul in the penalty box; a penalty kick.
In sports: A punishment for an infraction of the rules, often in the form of being removed from play for a specified amount of time.
A penalty was called when he tripped up his opponent.
A disadvantageous consequence of a previous event.
Where this word comes from
From Middle French pénalité, from pénal, from Latin poenālis, from poena, borrowing of Ancient Greek ποινή (poinḗ), from Proto-Hellenic *kʷoinā́, from Proto-Indo-European *kʷoynéh₂, comprising *kʷey- + *-néh₂.
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.