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:
“What we have we prize not to the worth
Whiles we enjoy it, but being lacked and lost,
Why, then we rack the value, then we find
The virtue that possession would not show us
Whiles it was ours.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The true runner comes to the finish and receives the prize and is crowned.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)
“To become a token woman—whether you win the Nobel Prize or merely get tenure at the cost of denying your sisters—is to become something less than a man ... since men are loyal at least to their own world-view, their laws of brotherhood and self-interest.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)