Legal Dictionary

repudiate

Legal Definition of repudiate

Related terms


Definition of repudiate

Etymology

    From Latin repudiō (“cast off, reject”) < repudium (“divorce”)

Pronunciation

  • (RP, US) IPA: /ɹɪˈpjuː.di.eɪt/, /ɹəˈpjuː.di.eɪt/
  • Audio (US) [?]

Verb

repudiate (third-person singular simple present repudiates, present participle repudiating, simple past and past participle repudiated)

  1. To reject the truth or validity of something; to deny.
  2. To refuse to have anything to do with; to disown.
  3. To refuse to pay or honor (a debt).

Quotations

Joyce Carol Oates: "Chaucer . . . not only came to doubt the worth of his extraordinary body of work, but repudiated it"

Eldridge Cleaver: "If a man like Malcolm X could change and repudiate racism, if I myself and other former Muslims can change, if young whites can change, then there is hope for America."

1848: '... she dictated to Briggs a furious answer in her own native tongue, repudiating Mrs. Rawdon Crawley altogether...' - William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair, Chapter XXXIV.

"The seventeenth century sometimes seems for more than a moment to gather up and to digest into its art all the experience of the human mind which (from the same point of view) the later centuries seem to have been partly engaged in repudiating." T. S. Eliot, Andrew Marvell.

"The fierce willingness to repudiate domination in a holistic manner is the starting point for progressive cultural revolution." --bell hooks

References:

  1. Wiktionary. Published under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.



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