Make Your Editor Cry: Extract Revenge vs. Exact Revenge

Make Your Editor Cry: Extract Revenge vs. Exact Revenge

According to Webster, “Exact,” when used as a verb, means to “demand, claim, require, exact” or “to ask or call for something as due or as necessary.”

When you “extract” something, you remove it, often by means of processing such as distillation or heat. For example, vanilla extract is a product of extracting the vanillin oils from the vanilla bean using grain alcohol.

The correct phrase is to “exact revenge.”

Example:

Thomas decided to exact revenge by surreptitiously placing a computer virus on Scott’s machine that destroyed the hard drive.