Why was it called "revenant" if most people don't understand that word ?

LOOOOOL OP, since when does "most people" mean you and your 3 retarded and uneducated friends?

OP -

I guess that English isn't your first language - no matter.

But I'm also guessing that the target audience would know the meaning of the audience.
The guys who market films sometimes get it right.

Anyway, let's be polite to each other, eh?
Goodnight from the UK.

The title is fine, actually. How do I know? When I was in high school, I missed many days because I was sick. Whenever I came back, people called me "the revenant".

The OP asked 2 reasonable questions and the initial answer was correct, as was the second, insofar as they addressed the meaning of the word.

The high handedness of some of the remarks in this thread is a bit much tho. Revenant is most certainly NOT an English word with currency. If you knew the word before the film, good for you. That doesn't make you anything more than a potentially better scrabble player. (Fwiw, my spell checker thinks revenant isn't an English word.)

As another poster pointed out, the movie has this title because it takes its cue from the title of one of many fictionalised accounts of the Hugh Glass story.

So why use an obscure word when an ordinary word will do? That's a style choice. It would likely have annoyed George Orwell or Ernest Hemingway. One needn't be knee deep in literary criticism to understand the nature of the question, and those who got all narky about it, only really pointed out they might not be as literate as they think.

Dictionary dot com defines REVENANT as "a person who returns as a spirit after death; ghost.

Can you give me another word that means the same thing?
Just because people have diminutive vocabularies is no reason for everyone else to play down to their ignorance.

Sonny: Is there a country you'd like to go to?
Sal: Wyoming.

I suppose they could have called it "Dude gets mauled by a bear and left for dead by the guy who killed his son but the dude didn't really die as everyone thought he would, he came back really pissed off," but that title doesn't really have the same ring to it.




Sonny: Is there a country you'd like to go to?
Sal: Wyoming.

Thank you all for your replies. Yes as someone mentionned here, i'm not american nor a native English speaker. I'm french, so yes i knew what a revenant was, but as i never saw that word used in any article, book or film before, i assumed it wasn't that much used. Apparently i was wrong.

Thanks for clearing this up for me.

Because the book was called The Revenant.