repudiate: [16] Repudiate originally meant ‘divorce one’s wife’. It comes from Latin repudiāre ‘divorce, reject’, a derivative of the noun repudium ‘divorce’. It has been suggested that the ultimate source of this may be pēs ‘foot’ (source of English pedal), in which case its underlying meaning would be virtually ‘kick out’. [repudiate etymology, repudiate origin, 英语词源]