prepunish
prepunish verb: to punish in advance.
Verb
prepunish (third-person singular simple present prepunishes, present participle prepunishing, simple past and past participle prepunished)
- To punish in advance.
- 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.2003, John Ray, William Ray, Mac OS X Maximum Security, page 256
Forms of prepunish
| third-person singular present | prepunishes |
|---|---|
| present participle | prepunishing |
| past participle | prepunished |
| past | prepunished |
Origin of prepunish
From pre- + punish.
Questions about prepunish
- What does prepunish mean?
- Prepunish means to punish in advance.
- What part of speech is prepunish?
- Prepunish is a verb.
- What is the past tense of prepunish?
- The past tense of prepunish is prepunished.
Words near prepunish in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: prepunish (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “prepunish.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/prepunish. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.