Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- transitive verb To make return for (something done or felt) in a similar or appropriate fashion.
- transitive verb To avenge (an insult or wrongdoing).
- transitive verb To respond to (another) or do something to or for (another) in return for that person's action or emotion:
- transitive verb To get revenge on (another) for wrongdoing.
from The Century Dictionary.
- To repay (either good or evil).
- In a bad sense, to retaliate; return evil for evil for or to; punish.
- To return.
- Synonyms Remunerate, Recompense, etc. (see
indemnify ), pay, repay, pay off. - noun Requital.
- noun For counsel given unto the king is this thy just requite?
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- transitive verb To repay; in a good sense, to recompense; to return (an equivalent) in good; to reward; in a bad sense, to retaliate; to return (evil) for evil; to punish.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- verb To return in kind; To
repay ; torecompense ; toreward . - verb To
retaliate .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- verb make repayment for or return something
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word requite.
Examples
-
Behold > [May He behold] 9 And what I cannot requite, +requite+ with usury. requite > [may He requite] usury > interest
-
He is desperate to be shadow chancellor, the second most important role on the opposition frontbench after your own, and he will be unforgiving if you don't requite his ambition.
Ed Miliband: You thought fighting your brother was tough. That was the easy bit
-
Undoubtedly this liar of singular felicity would open his mouth and requite me for my St. Elias bear.
-
Because I needed to learn how to do that, too: how to put together a query letter, and a synopsis oh, bless you, agents who do not requite a synopsis and how to think about having something larger than a short story out and under consideration.
-
Because I needed to learn how to do that, too: how to put together a query letter, and a synopsis oh, bless you, agents who do not requite a synopsis and how to think about having something larger than a short story out and under consideration.
-
The report by the President's Cancer Panel emphasize how "the requite knowledge and technologies exist" to provide safe "alternatives" to cancer-causing agents.
Karl Grossman: Cancer -- The Number One Killer -- And Its Environmental Causes
-
The report by the President's Cancer Panel emphasize how "the requite knowledge and technologies exist" to provide safe "alternatives" to cancer-causing agents.
Karl Grossman: Cancer -- The Number One Killer -- And Its Environmental Causes
-
He had made her of none account, and she would requite the injury in full.
-
Fixing that problem would requite U.S. policy follow the roots of their support of the Taliban all the way up to the India/Pakistan animosity, and nothing--nothing--in the U.S.'s military-first strategy comes close to doing so.
Robert Greenwald and Derrick Crowe: Failure, Not Progress, in Afghanistan
-
What do you do if you are born too late to compete, if you love someone more than they can properly requite, if you realize the object of your worship is, in some fundamental way, a fraud?
shanvrolijk commented on the word requite
God will requite them for their mockery, and will leave them for a while in their overweening arrogance, blindly stumbling to and fro.
http://www.muhammad-asad.com/Message-of-Quran.pdf
March 2, 2018