repress

Ultimately from Latin repressus, the perfect passive participle of reprimō (“I repress”).

• IPA^(key): /ɹəˈpɹɛs/

  • Audio (Southern England):

    (file)

• Rhymes: -ɛs

repress (third-person singular simple present represses, present participle repressing, simple past and past participle repressed)

1. (transitive) To forcefully prevent an upheaval from developing further.

   Synonyms: crush, put down, quell, subdue, suppress

   to repress rebellion or sedition

   to repress the first risings of discontent

3. (transitive, by extension) To check; to keep back.

   Synonyms: restrain, hold back; see also Thesaurus:curb

   • 1671, John Milton, “The Second Book”, in Paradise Regain’d. A Poem. In IV Books. To which is Added, Samson Agonistes, London: […] J[ohn] M[acock] for John Starkey […], →OCLC, page 37, lines 542–544:

     Deſire of wine and all delicious drinks […] Thou couldſt repreſs,

• repression
• repressive
• repressor

From re- +‎ press.

repress (third-person singular simple present represses, present participle repressing, simple past and past participle repressed)

1. To press again.

   to repress a vinyl record

   • 2019, Niall Williams, This is Happiness, Bloomsbury (2020), pages 300-301:

     It had been a fraught car journey. From it my abiding memory is Charlie Troy having a deep but short-lived relationship with a smoking cigarette, rummaging after in the depthless depth of a shiny black handbag for a forbidden lipstick, finding it, applying it in Heaney’s mirror with a magician’s dexterity that defied the inconsistencies of the road, pressing, unpressing, and repressing her lips until the look came to her satisfaction and the bow was drawn.

repress (plural represses)

1. A record pressed again; a repressing.
   • 2010, Clinton Heylin, Bootleg! The Rise And Fall Of The Secret Recording Industry:

     Save for the shows he actually taped — Dylan, Springsteen, Page & Plant and other kindred spirits — his own titles by 1994 were just represses of hard-to-find Japanese or American titles.

• Presser, presser