Meaning
An unstoppable agent of someone's downfall - the rival who always beats them, the fate that catches them, occasionally their own worst habit. In modern loose use it shades into any arch-enemy, but the core is retribution: the one who finally collects. Capitalized only for the goddess; the tone runs from superhero-comic (arch-nemesis) to tragic retribution, and the strongest use implies the downfall is deserved. Regional use: General English; classical origin.
Origin
Nemesis was the Greek goddess of retribution - her name from nemain, to give what is due - who punished hubris, the arrogance that disturbs the proper distribution of things. Hesiod makes her a daughter of Night; she was originally a neutral distributor of fortune, in Herodotus and Pindar hardening into the resentment that answers disturbance; her cult title Adrasteia means, plausibly, one from whom there is no escape. Pheidias's statue at Rhamnous was carved, Pausanias reports, from Parian marble the Persians had brought to memorialize a victory at Marathon they never won. English keeps her busy: Wiktionary's senses run from arch-enemy through the agent of a hero's engineered downfall - the personification of the fatal flaw - to a deserved, unavoidable defeat, with citations from 2001 to 2021. The plural, inevitably, is nemeses.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a nemesis of
- arch-nemesis
- his own nemesis
Usage Examples
- After three finals and three defeats, the northern club had become their tournament nemesis.
- The auditor was the ministry's nemesis, arriving every spring with the same unanswered question.
- Careless sourcing proved the columnist's own nemesis, undone one correction at a time.