I like having a dictionary and a thesaurus to hand, I know I could just look things up in MS Word but sometimes nothing beats picking up a dictionary and leafing through it. From time to time and whenever the mood takes me I’m going to put up a dictionary corner post. It could be a word that I thinks gets misused (as is the case with today’s word ‘revert’) or it could just be a word I like the sound of or one that just amuses me. Feel free to suggest words for future dictionary corner posts.

Revert is a word that puzzles me, it gets used frequently in business correspondence and I think it gets used incorrectly. I came across a piece in last Saturday’s Irish Times magazine in the ‘What’s Hot / What’s Cold’ section that read ‘Please revert’ - Bizarre misuse of the word, appearing with growing frequency, as in “Please leave a message and I will revert to you on my return”. How do you plan to do that, then?


So the correct dictionary definition for ‘revert’ taken from the compact Oxford English dictionary is:

Revert – verb, (revert to)
1. Return to a previous state, practice or belief
2. Biology, the action of an organism returning to a former or ancestral type
3. The legal right, especially of the original owner, to possess or succeed to property when the present possessor dies or a lease ends
ORIGIN Latin revertere ‘turn back’