GENUFLECT
verb JEN-yuh-flekt
What It Means
To genuflect is to kneel, or nearly kneel, on one knee and then rise again in worship or as an act of respect. In figurative use, genuflect means “to be humbly obedient or respectful.”
// Churchgoers genuflected before the altar.
// The politician was criticized for genuflecting to corporate interests.
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GENUFLECT in Context
“Many of the people whom director Rob Reiner has throwing bouquets during this documentary—Steven Spielberg, Larry David, Jon Stewart, Conan O’Brien and Sharon Stone among them—are all more famous than Mr. [Albert] Brooks, but genuflect before his comedic genius.” — John Anderson, The Wall Street Journal, 9 Nov. 2023
Did You Know?
Today we give reverence to genuflect, which comes from the Late Latin word genuflectere, formed from the noun genu (“knee”) and the verb flectere (“to bend”). Flectere appears in the etymologies of a number of more common verbs, such as reflect (“to bend or throw back light”) and deflect (“to turn aside”). By comparison genu has seen little use in English, but it did give us geniculate, a word used in scientific contexts to mean “bent abruptly at an angle like a bent knee.” Despite the resemblance, words such as genius and genuine are not related to genuflect; instead, they are related (genius directly, and genuine indirectly) to the Latin verb gignere, meaning “to beget.”