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Make Your Point > Archived Issues > PREVAIL & PREVALENT

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pronounce PREVAIL:

pruh VALE
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pronounce PREVALENT:

PREV uh lunt
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connect these words to others:

The powerful words prevail and prevalent trace back to the Latin valere, meaning "to be strong, powerful, healthy, worthy, or valuable." 

Valere also gave us the words 
   valid,
   valiant,
   value,
   evaluate,
   equivalent,
   available (literally "having force or having an advantage"),
   the name Valerie (meaning "strong"),
   val___e ("the power to attract or repulse people"),
   val__ ("determination and boldness in a dangerous situation"),
   and am__val___ (literally "[feeling] both strengths," and meaning "having a hard time deciding").

Can you recall those last three?

(To reveal any word with blanks, give it a click.)  

definitions:

"Prevail" and "prevalent" trace back to a Latin word meaning "to be stronger, to be more powerful." We've used them in English for many centuries, with their meanings fluctuating a bit.

Today, most often, to prevail is to win or succeed, especially against some threat or some competitor, or to keep on existing even when things or people have tried to end it.

And something prevalent is common or widespread, as if it continues to exist because it has won or succeeded against other things.

grammatical bits:

Parts of speech:

"Prevail" is a verb, usually the intransitive kind: "Justice prevails;" "Good will prevail against evil;" "The Redhawks prevailed against the Squirrels."

"Prevalent" is an adjective: "a prevalent belief," "Heart disease is prevalent in the US."

Other forms: 

The other verb forms are "prevailed" and "prevailing."

The noun is "prevalence," and it's the uncountable kind, as in "We hope to reduce the prevalence of heart disease."

how to use them:

When you want to sound serious and formal, even a little dramatic, reach for the very common words "prevail" and "prevalent."

We talk about people and teams that prevail in fights, games, competitions, and elections. Often we say someone prevails against their competitor: "Caleb prevailed over yet another pair of challengers on Jeopardy!"

We also talk about trends, forces, and other abstract things that prevail, sometimes over other things: "Peace prevailed for a century;" "Justice finally prevailed for them;" "In most children's books, good prevails over evil."

Occasionally, we talk about people prevailing over abstract things: "She prevailed over her fear."

For the adjective, we talk about prevalent technologies, brands, habits, attitudes, beliefs, fears, concerns, traditions, diseases, and ways of life.

If you want to strongly emphasize that something is not just common but also winning out over other things, then instead of calling it prevalent, call it prevailing. For example, there's a prevailing belief that couples should seek to communicate well with each other; this wisdom prevails over the competing belief that couples should try to win arguments against each other.

examples:

"Despite the church's objections, Kepler's heliocentric system would prevail eventually, because Kepler was right and Aristotle was wrong."
  — Charles Seife, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, 2000

"On days when the dust is less prevalent in Mars's atmosphere, Fly and I are able to see the stars." 
  — Jasmine Warga, A Rover's Story, 2022

"And as adolescents get phones at younger ages, [disordered eating and looksmaxxing] behavior is becoming more prevalent."
  — Sumathi Reddy, Wall Street Journal, 4 May 2026

has this page helped you understand "prevail" and "prevalent"?

   

Awesome, I'm glad it helped!

Thanks for letting me know!
If you have any questions about these terms, please message me at Liesl@HiloTutor.com.




study them:

Explain the meanings of "prevail" and "prevalent" without saying "come out on top" or "be the most common."

try one out:

In the final chapter of his 1980 book Cosmos, Carl Sagan wrote:

"As the ancient mythmakers knew, we are the children equally of the sky and the Earth. In our tenure on this planet we have accumulated dangerous evolutionary baggage, hereditary propensities for aggression and ritual, submission to leaders and hostility to outsiders, which place our survival in some question. But we have also acquired compassion for others, love for our children and our children's children, a desire to learn from history, and a great soaring passionate intelligence—the clear tools for our continued survival and prosperity. Which aspects of our nature will prevail is uncertain."

Which of those aspects of human nature do you think have prevailed today? Which ones do you think will prevail in the grand scheme of things?




before you review, play:

Try to spend 20 seconds or more on the game below. Don’t skip straight to the review—first, let your working memory empty out.

Our game this month is Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Fragments.

In each issue, check out an excerpt from a master of American prose, one in which I've changed the lovely sentence fragments into ugly but grammatically correct sentences. Try restoring the excerpt to its original glory by chiseling those sentences down into fragments.

You can check out some examples here.

Try this one today. It's from Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises:

The Boulevard Raspail always made dull riding. It was like a certain stretch on the P. L. M. between Fontainebleau and Montereau that always made me feel bored and dead and dull until it was over. I suppose it is some association of ideas that makes those dead places in a journey. There are other streets in Paris as ugly as the Boulevard Raspail. It is a street I do not mind walking down at all. However, I cannot stand to ride along it. Perhaps I had read something about it once. That was the way Robert Cohn was about all of Paris. I wondered where Cohn got that incapacity to enjoy Paris. Possibly he got it from Mencken. Mencken hates Paris, I believe. So many young men get their likes and dislikes from Mencken.

To see the original version, scroll all the way down.

review these words:

1. One opposite of PREVALENT is

A. RARE.
B. SHORT.
C. WISE.

2. From The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro: "The guests were never less than courteous to one another, but for all that, a rather tense atmosphere, characterized largely by distrust, seemed to prevail at this stage." By choosing the word "prevail," instead of, say, "exist," Ishiguro's narrator implies that the tension and distrust seem to have _____ the courtesy.

A. cooked faster than
B. won in a fight against
C. tunneled underneath




Answers to the review questions:
1. A
2. B

From the game: There are lots of different ways to render each highlighted bit into a fragment! If your version pleases your ears, then you did great.

Here's the original version:

The Boulevard Raspail always made dull riding. It was like a certain stretch on the P. L. M. between Fontainebleau and Montereau that always made me feel bored and dead and dull until it was over. I suppose it is some association of ideas that makes those dead places in a journey. There are other streets in Paris as ugly as the Boulevard Raspail. It is a street I do not mind walking down at all. But I cannot stand to ride along it. Perhaps I had read something about it once. That was the way Robert Cohn was about all of Paris. I wondered where Cohn got that incapacity to enjoy Paris. Possibly from Mencken. Mencken hates Paris, I believe. So many young men get their likes and dislikes from Mencken.


a final word:


I hope you're enjoying Make Your Point. It's made with love.

I'm Liesl Johnson, a reading and writing tutor on a mission to explore, illuminate, and celebrate words.


From my blog:
On vocabulary...
      36 ways to study words.
      Why we forget words, & how to remember them.
      How to use sophisticated words without being awkward.
On writing...
      How to improve any sentence.
      How to motivate our kids to write.
      How to stop procrastinating and start writing.
      How to bulk up your writing when you have to meet a word count.

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A disclaimer: When I write definitions, I use plain language and stick to the words' common, useful applications. If you're interested in authoritative and multiple definitions of words, I encourage you to check a dictionary. Also, because I'm American, I stick to American English when I share words' meanings, usage, and pronunciations; these elements sometimes vary across world Englishes.

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