'Renaissance' is Latin for 'rebirth' — the same PIE root behind 'gene,' 'nation,' 'nature,' and 'native.'
A revival of or renewed interest in something; when capitalized, the period of European cultural, artistic, and intellectual rebirth from roughly the 14th to the 17th century.
From French 'renaissance,' meaning 'rebirth,' from 'renaître' (to be reborn), from Vulgar Latin *renāscere, from Latin 'renāscī' (to be born again), composed of 're-' (again) and 'nāscī' (to be born). The PIE root is *ǵenh₁- (to beget, to give birth), the same root that produced 'genre,' 'gene,' 'genesis,' 'genius,' 'nation,' and 'nature.' The term was popularized by Jules Michelet in his 1855 history of France and retroactively applied to the cultural movement that had already been underway for centuries
The Italians who lived during what we call the Renaissance did not use that word. Giorgio Vasari in 1550 wrote of a 'rinascita' (rebirth) in the arts, but the term 'Renaissance' as the name for a historical period was coined by the French historian Jules Michelet in 1855 and cemented by Jacob Burckhardt's 'The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy' in 1860 — three centuries after the period had ended.
Words closest in meaning, ranked by similarity