Resent
*Resent* arrives in English carrying a double meaning embedded in its very structure: to feel again, and to feel *against*. The word entered English in the early seventeenth century from French *ressentir*, a compound of the prefix *re-* and *sentir* (to feel, to sense). That French verb traces directly to Latin *sentire*, to perceive through the senses, to feel, to think — a root that quietly underlies some of the most emotionally loaded vocabulary in the European languages.
The Latin Foundation: *sentire*
The Proto-Indo-European root behind *sentire* is reconstructed as *\*sent-*, meaning to head toward, to go, or to travel a path — the semantic shift from physical movement to mental perception being one of the most well-documented transitions in the history of Latin. The idea is of the mind moving toward something, attending to it, taking it in. From *\*sent-* come not only *sentire* and its Romance descendants but also the Germanic family: Old High German *sinnan* (to travel, to strive), and by extension Modern German *Sinn* (sense, meaning, mind).
Latin *sentire* generated an unusually large and semantically varied family. *Sententia* (opinion, sentence, judicial ruling) gave English *sentence*. *Sensus* gave *sense*, *sensation*, *sensible*, *sensual*. *Consentire* (to feel together) gave *consent*. *Dissentire* (to feel apart) gave *dissent*. And the iterative or intensive form *\*sentimentum* — feeling as a sustained state — gave *sentiment*, which entered English via Old French in the fourteenth century.
French *ressentir* and the Prefix *re-*
When Old French compounded *re-* with *sentir*, the result was *ressentir*, and the semantics were straightforwardly reflexive or intensive: to feel strongly, to feel deeply, or to feel again. Medieval and Early Modern French used *ressentir* with relatively neutral force — one could *ressentir* gratitude, pleasure, or pain equally. The prefix *re-* did not yet load the word with the bitterness it would eventually acquire.
The derived noun *ressentiment* preserved this broader usage into the seventeenth century in French, though it gradually narrowed. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's use of *ressentiment* — which he left in French even when writing German — would later crystallize the word's darkest potential: a chronic, festering sense of injury rooted in powerlessness, directed at those perceived to have caused the suffering. Nietzsche did not invent this meaning; he named and anatomised a psychological tendency that the word had long been approaching.
Entry into English
The earliest attested English uses of *resent* date to the 1620s, and the sense is broad. Writers used it to mean to feel strongly about something, whether positively or negatively. John Milton used related forms in this neutral-to-positive sense — to receive an impression, to experience a feeling. Thomas Hobbes and other seventeenth-century writers employed *resent* where we might write *feel* or *perceive*.
The narrowing to specifically negative feeling — the sense of feeling injured, of nursing a grievance — appears clearly by the mid-seventeenth century and becomes dominant by the eighteenth. By the time Samuel Johnson defined *resent* in his 1755 *Dictionary of the English Language*, the negative meaning was standard: to consider as an injury or affront, to feel indignation at.
This is a classic case of pejoration, the process by which words drift from neutral or broad meanings toward negative ones. The emotional specificity of resentment — its association with festering grievance rather than immediate anger — distinguishes it from *anger* or *fury* (both of which imply active, present-tense responses) and makes it semantically useful for describing a chronic, retrospective emotional state.
The Temporal Dimension
What distinguishes *resentment* from plain *anger* is its relationship to time. The *re-* prefix, even if originally intensive rather than strictly iterative, came to carry an implication of repetition — feeling something again and again. Resentment is anger that does not resolve, that circles back. This temporal recursiveness is built into the word's structure, even if historically it arrived there by accident.
Cognates and Relatives
The family of *sentire* in English is broad:
- Sentence (from *sententia*) — originally a stated opinion or ruling, then a grammatical unit - Sentinel (from *sentinella*) — one who watches and listens, whose senses are deployed - Assent and dissent — agreement and disagreement as coordinated or divergent feeling - Consent — feeling together - Scent — from Old French *sentir*, to perceive by smell specifically; the *sc-* spelling is a seventeenth-century affectation by English scribes influenced by Latin - Presentiment — a feeling that comes before, a foreboding
The Germanic cognates are equally striking. Old English *sīþ* (journey, path, time) descends from the same *\*sent-* root — the idea of going somewhere, of directed movement. The word survives in archaic English as *sith* (since, afterward). German *Sinn* and *sinnlich* (sensual, perceptual) complete the picture of a root that once described purposeful movement and came to describe the full interior world of human experience.
Modern Usage
In contemporary English, *resent* retains the seventeenth-century pejoration almost completely. To resent is to feel bitterness or indignation at a perceived wrong, especially one that one cannot or does not directly challenge. The word carries a connotation of powerlessness or suppression that distinguishes it from *anger* — one resents what one cannot openly confront.
The derived noun *resentment* appears at higher frequency in psychological and therapeutic discourse than in casual speech, where it names a specific pathological pattern: the sustained, internalized carrying of grievance. Nietzsche's *ressentiment* — adopted untranslated into English philosophical vocabulary — names a more systematic version of this, a whole orientation of the self built around injury and its repetition.
The word has traveled from Latin perception, through French emotion, through English moral philosophy, into modern psychology — each stage refining the meaning while preserving the structural fact encoded in the Latin root: that feeling is a form of moving toward something, and resentment is what happens when that movement finds no exit.