Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Infliction of punishment in return for a wrong committed; retribution.
  • idiom (with a vengeance) With great violence or force.
  • idiom (with a vengeance) To an extreme degree.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Extremely; very.
  • noun Punishment inflicted in return for an injury or an offense.
  • noun Harm, mischief, or evil generally: formerly often used as an imprecation, especially in the phrase what a (the) vengeance!
  • noun Synonyms 1. Retribution, Retaliation, etc. See revenge.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun Punishment inflicted in return for an injury or an offense; retribution; -- often, in a bad sense, passionate or unrestrained revenge.
  • noun obsolete Harm; mischief.
  • noun [Obs.] what! -- emphatically.
  • noun [Colloq.] with even greater intensity.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Revenge taken for an insult, injury, or other wrong.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the act of taking revenge (harming someone in retaliation for something harmful that they have done) especially in the next life

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English, from Old French, from vengier, to avenge, from Latin vindicāre; see vindicate.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Old French venger ("avenge")

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Examples

Comments

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  • WITCH

    You stay out of this! I'm here for

    vengeance! So it was you, was it? You killed

    her,....

    June 11, 2010