Review or revise?

To review something is to look at it, read it, or talk about it again. You can review a lesson  to be sure you understand it. You can review the things you talked about in a meeting to be sure that everyone knows what they need to do. You can review a document to be sure there aren't any mistakes.

To revise something is to make changes or corrections. You can revise any written document: a manuscript, a report, a presentation.

You can also revise things related to financial information, like budgets and quarterly reports, in order to correct or update the information.

These verbs are obviously closely related, and we often review a document and then revise it.

Here are some examples of the usage of these two verbs:

"Could you review my sales report? I want to be sure there aren't any errors."

When the phone rang, James was revising his manuscript.

There were a lot of mistakes in the report, which showed that the manager hadn't reviewed it.

We revised the sales forecasts for the fourth quarter after reviewing the results of the third quarter.

Note: You can also use the word review as a noun or verb to talk about a written opinion about a film, book, restaurant or work of art. For example: Bob writes restaurant reviews for The New York Times. Or, Bob reviews restaurants for The New York Times. As you can see, when we use review as a noun, we usually put the another noun before it to explain the focus: movie review, book review, theatre review, etc.