The phrase "act of vindictiveness" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe an action taken out of a desire for revenge or to harm someone as a form of retaliation.
Example: "His decision to sabotage her project was clearly an act of vindictiveness, stemming from their previous conflict."
Alternatives: "act of revenge" or "act of spite".
The decision by the Harvard Club of New York to blackball Eliot Spitzer is an out-of-touch act of vindictiveness.
Deborah Factor, an assistant Morris County prosecutor, asked the psychiatrists if they considered the killings an act of vindictiveness or mercy killings.
Estonian politicians used unfortunate rhetoric, and may have been overhasty in moving the capital's best-known Soviet war-memorial in what seemed to at least some local Russians as an act of vindictiveness.
There was widespread shock and international condemnation in the last act of vindictiveness by the Islamists as they retreated from Timbuktu – burning priceless manuscripts taken from the Ahmed Baba library, a renowned repository of Mali's historic literature, as they left.
The US embargo against Cuba is nothing less than an act of vindictiveness and spite; the fact it is finally crumbling will alleviate the suffering of millions of Cubans.
The rabbi's lawyers want jurors to believe that it was a concocted act of vindictiveness by a troubled man who was angry over his dismissal as the rabbi's private detective.
Severely underweight at birth because Serkalem's physical and psychological privation in one of Africa's worst prisons, an incubator was deemed life-saving to the new-born child by prison doctors; which was, in an act of incomprehensible vindictiveness, denied by the authorities.
Therefore, it now seems fair to consider the possibility that Reid and his allies might have decided to oppose any Blogojevich appointee (other than Duckworth or Madigan) as an act of political vindictiveness in response to the governor's refusal to kowtow to party leaders.
There is a level of vindictiveness in the archdiocese".
The New York Board of Rabbis protested, calling Shylock "an amalgam of vindictiveness, cruelty and avarice".
To Messrs Allen and Straw: We are not seeking an apology from you out of vindictiveness.
