Meaning & use
re-enact
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Meanings
verbtransitive
To act out a past event, scene, or story again, often as a performance or for study.
Grammar: Takes an object: re-enact a battle, re-enact the crime.
Patterns
- re-enact something
- re-enact an event for someone
- re-enact something in a film
Every summer the town re-enacts a famous sea battle in the harbor.
The students re-enacted the signing of the treaty for their history class.
Police officers re-enacted the crime to test the witness's memory.
verbtransitivelegalformal
To make a law, rule, or agreement exist again after it has stopped being in force.
Grammar: Takes an object; used mainly in legal and political writing.
Patterns
- re-enact a law
- re-enact legislation
Parliament voted to re-enact the old safety rules.
The court ruled that the state could not re-enact the ban.
Word forms
| third person singular | re-enacts |
|---|---|
| past tense | re-enacted |
| past participle | re-enacted |
| -ing form | re-enacting |
Common combinations
- re-enact a scene
- The actors re-enacted a scene from the novel.
- re-enact a battle
- Hundreds of volunteers re-enact a Civil War battle each year.
- re-enact the past
- The festival lets visitors re-enact the past for a day.
- faithfully re-enact
- The film faithfully re-enacts the final hours of the voyage.
- re-enact a crime
- Detectives sometimes re-enact a crime at the scene.
Synonyms and how they differ
- reenact
- The same word spelled without a hyphen; both spellings are accepted, but re-enact is more common in British writing.
- recreate
- Use recreate for making something exist or happen again in general, while re-enact is specifically about acting an event out.
- stage
- Stage means to put on a performance; it does not carry the idea of repeating a real past event.
Word family
- re-enactment noun
- A performance or reconstruction of a past event.
- enact verb
- To perform something, or to make a law official.
- enactment noun
- The process of making a law, or a performance of something.
Commonly confused: re-enact or reenact? re-enact or enact?
re-enact vs reenact
This is the same word without a hyphen. Both are correct, but keep one style within a piece of writing.
re-enact vs enact
Enact means to perform or make official for the first time; re-enact adds the idea of doing it again.
Practice
Which sentence uses re-enact correctly?
Choose one answer.
Re-enact is transitive, so it needs a direct object: re-enact a market. The other options add prepositions that the verb does not take.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “re-enact”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.