renounce

From Old French renoncier (French renoncer), from Latin renuntiare.

• Rhymes: -aʊns

renounce (plural renounces)

1. (card games) An act of renouncing.

• renunciation

renounce (third-person singular simple present renounces, present participle renouncing, simple past and past participle renounced)

1. (transitive) To give up, resign, surrender, atsake.

   to renounce a title to land or to a throne

2. (transitive) To cast off, repudiate.
   • Shakespeare

     This world I do renounce, and in your sights / Shake patiently my great affliction off.

3. (transitive) To decline further association with someone or something, disown.
4. (transitive) To abandon, forsake, discontinue (an action, habit, intention, etc), sometimes by open declaration.
5. (intransitive) To make a renunciation of something.
   • Dryden

     He of my sons who fails to make it good, / By one rebellious act renounces to my blood.

6. (intransitive) To surrender formally some right or trust.
   • W. D. Christie

     Dryden died without a will, and his widow having renounced, his son Charles administered on June 10.

7. (intransitive, card games) To fail to follow suit; playing a card of a different suit when having no card of the suit led.

• forsay
• forswear

• renounceable
• renouncement
• renouncer

• announce
• denounce
• pronounce

• renounce in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913.