Recall

How to spell recall

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce recall

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does recall mean?

1. verbTo bring a fact, event, or image back into the mind; to remember.
2. verbTo order the return of a person or a faulty product to its source.
3. nounAn official order to return a faulty product, or the act of remembering something.

Recall in a sentence

• verb

  She cannot recall where she left her passport.

• verb

  The manufacturer had to recall thousands of cars over a brake fault.

• noun

  The safety recall affected every model sold last year.

• verb

  Witnesses struggled to recall the exact time of the crash.

• verb

  The embassy decided to recall its ambassador for urgent talks.

• noun

  His recall of names was remarkable for someone his age.

Where does recall come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

Recall is a compound formed within English from the prefix re-, which comes from Latin and means 'back' or 'again', joined to the verb 'call'. The verb 'call' is itself a sturdy borrowing from Old Norse kalla, meaning 'to cry out' or 'to summon', a word the Vikings left behind in English during their settlement of the north and east of England. By the late 1500s English speakers had stitched the two pieces together to mean literally 'to call back', whether calling a person back to a place or calling a fact back into the mind. The 'remember' sense grew naturally from this image of summoning a memory back into view, while the modern manufacturing sense of summoning faulty goods back to the maker is a much later extension. Because both halves are common everyday words, the spelling is regular; the only thing to watch is the double l at the end, inherited straight from 'call'.

How the word is built

• re- (back, again)
• call (to summon or cry out, from Old Norse kalla)