penalty

Other forms of penalty

plural

penalties·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about penalty

What does penalty mean?

penalty means "the act of punishing". That is the primary sense; the word has 4 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in penalty?

penalty has 3 syllables: pen-al-ty. The stress falls on "pen". In IPA it is /ˈpɛnəlti/.

What is another word for penalty?

Close synonyms include punishment, penalization, penalisation. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

What is the opposite of penalty?

The recorded antonyms are reward.

Is penalty a common word?

penalty is banded "Common" — everyday vocabulary in speech and writing. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.