Prize

A prize is an award to be given to a person or a group of people to recognise and reward actions or achievements. Official prizes often involve monetary rewards as well as the fame that comes with them. Some prizes are also associated with extravagant awarding ceremonies, such as the Academy Awards.

Prizes are also given to publicize noteworthy or exemplary behaviour, and to provide incentives for improved outcomes and competitive efforts. In general, prizes are regarded in a positive light, and their winners are admired. However, many prizes, especially the more famous ones, have often caused controversy and jealousy.

Specific types of prizes include:

  • Booby prize: typically awarded as a joke or insult to whoever finished last (e.g., wooden spoon (award)).
  • consolation prize: an award given to those who do not win.
  • Hierarchical prizes, where the best award is "first prize", "grand prize", or "gold medal". Subordinate awards are "second prize", "third prize", etc., or "first runner-up" and "second runner-up", etc., or "silver medal" and "bronze medal". (In some contests, "grand prize" is more desirable than "first prize".)
    • On game shows in the UK, the term is "star prize", while in Australia, it is "major prize".
  • Purchase prize or acquisition prize: a monetary prize given in an art competition in exchange for the winning work.

Famous quotes containing the word prize:

    Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.
    Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919)

    It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love. In a nation which increasingly appears to prize social virtues, Howard Hughes remains not merely antisocial but grandly, brilliantly, surpassingly, asocial. He is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit.
    Joan Didion (b. 1934)

    In the corrupted currents of this world
    Offence’s gilded hand may shove by justice,
    And oft ‘tis seen the wicked prize itself
    Buys out the law; but ‘tis not so above:
    There is no shuffling.
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)