Meaning
Someone who returns home - or is welcomed back - after a long, disreputable absence, expecting and usually receiving forgiveness. The phrase emphasizes the return and the welcome, though its adjective, as the parable reminds readers, properly means wasteful. Warm, forgiving register, though pedants may note that prodigal means wasteful, not wandering - the return is the plot, not the word. Regional use: General English; Biblical origin.
Origin
Luke chapter 15 tells it: the younger son demands his inheritance early, squanders it abroad in reckless living, is reduced by famine to envying the swine he feeds, and comes home to confess; the father runs to meet him, dresses him in robe, ring, and sandals, and feasts him, telling the resentful elder brother that this brother was dead and is alive again. The Greek title's word asotos means wasteful - Philo speaks of wastrel children - so prodigal refers to the squandering, not the homecoming, which is why scholars also call the parable the Lost Son or the Loving Father. English moralists took it up wholesale: the prodigal-son play was a morality-drama subgenre of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, The London Prodigal was staged in 1605, and Shakespeare gestures at the story in three plays. Modern usage keeps the welcome: the Oasis brothers were the prodigal sons of Brit-pop on their 2024 reunion, and Wiktionary notes the fisherman's bonus that a cobia is also called a prodigal son.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a prodigal son
- prodigal daughter
- the prodigal returns
Usage Examples
- After nine years in Sydney and two unanswered Christmases, the prodigal son came home for his mother's seventieth.
- The party welcomed its prodigal daughter back with a safe seat and no questions about 2019.
- He returned like the prodigal son, thinner, quieter, and suddenly serious about the family orchard.