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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

pentimento.

The presence of traces of a previous work in an artistic or literary work; especially (painting) an image which has been painted over but is still detectable.

10 characters4 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/ˌpɛntɪˈmɛntəʊ/Received-Pronunciation/ˌpɛntəˈmɛntoʊ/General-American[-ɾə-]General-American[-ɾoʊ]General-American
  1. The presence of traces of a previous work in an artistic or literary work; especially (painting) an image which has been painted over but is still detectable.

Where this word comes from

[Alt: A blue-tinted painting of a man's bent neck, with a faint image of a woman's face in its background] Learned borrowing from Italian pentimento (“repentance, penance, penitence; remorse; change of opinion; correction; traces of a previous image or work in an artwork”), from pentìrsi (“to repent; to regret”) + -mento (suffix forming nouns representing the actions of verbs to which it is attached). Pentìrsi is derived from Latin paenitēre, the present active infinitive of paeniteō (“to cause to repent; to repent; to be sorry, regret”), from Proto-Indo-European *peh₁- (“to hate; to hurt”).

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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.