Prepunish

verb

verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Verb
  1. 1
    To punish in advance. transitive

    "Too many administrators place limits on their users not because of any increase in security that those limits provide, but out of some twisted desire to prepunish users for potential transgressions, in the hope that this will cow them into more quiescent obedience to the rules."

Example

More examples

"Too many administrators place limits on their users not because of any increase in security that those limits provide, but out of some twisted desire to prepunish users for potential transgressions, in the hope that this will cow them into more quiescent obedience to the rules."

Etymology

From pre- + punish.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.