Relieve? Or Relief? - Which One Is It? - Lil' But Mighty English

Hi, I’m Ms Lee, a teacher at Lil’ but Mighty, and the answer to this question is no, relieve and relief are not acceptable spellings of the same word. What is their difference then? Consider the following example to help you identify their difference.

e.g. Taking medication helps to relieve the pain in my foot.

e.g. Taking medication provides relief from the pain in my foot.

Have you noticed how the words are used differently? If yes, you would agree with me to say that relieve is used as a verb while relief is a noun. In the first example, you can see how taking medication leads to the action of relieving or reducing the pain in my foot. In the second example, “relief” is referred to as a thing (in this case the feeling) that I get from taking medication.

A great tip on how to use these words differently is to pay attention to the word that comes before and/or after relieve or relief. As relieve is a verb, you often need to have a noun after it to show that the action was done to somebody or something.

e.g. Jackson wanted to relieve the stress he felt by taking a walk.

Here, Jackson is doing the action “to relieve” to the noun “stress” such that he feels better. Another clue is also the use of “to” that must always be followed by an infinitive, which is a verb in its base form.

As for “relief”, you can look out for articles like “the” and “a”, pronouns like “his/her”, or prepositions like “with”, “in” and “of” which hint to you that a noun/noun phrase should follow after them. Let’s look at a common example.

e.g. Jackson heaved a sigh of relief after taking a nice long walk.

Notice how the “sigh” is followed by the preposition “of” before the word “relief”. The phrase “a sigh of relief” is a noun phrase which refers to the happiness that Jackson now feels aPer taking a walk. Try the following questions to see if you have nailed the use of these different word forms!

Q1. The dog tried to ( relieve / relief ) its pain by licking its wound.

Q2. She Lance smiled in with ( relieve / relief ) upon hearing the good news. 

Did you manage to answer them correctly? Let’s check your answers!

Q1. The dog tried to ( relieve / relief ) its pain by licking its wound.