Recalling

How to spell recalling

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce recalling

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does recalling mean?

1. verbBringing a fact, event, or impression back into the mind; remembering.
2. verbOfficially ordering the return of a person or product, especially a defective one.

Recalling in a sentence

• She sat quietly, recalling the details of the meeting before writing her report.

• The manufacturer is recalling thousands of cars over a faulty brake sensor.

• He had trouble recalling the name of the hotel where they had stayed.

• The embassy began recalling its staff as the situation worsened.

Where does recalling come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

This is the present participle of 'recall', a word assembled in English from the prefix 're-', meaning 'back' or 'again', and the verb 'call'. The verb 'call' descends from the Old Norse 'kalla', meaning 'to cry out' or 'to summon', which Norse settlers brought into northern England and which gradually displaced the native Old English equivalent. Stitched together, 'recall' literally suggested calling something back, and from the 1500s it carried both the concrete sense of summoning a person or thing to return and the mental sense of calling a memory back into the mind. The same 're-' that means 'back' is seen in 'return' and 'recover', and remembering that 'call' simply doubles its 'l' before '-ing' helps fix the spelling. Modern uses range from recalling a faulty product to recalling a half-forgotten name, all rooted in that single image of calling something back.

How the word is built

• re- (back, again)
• call (to summon or cry out)
• -ing (present participle suffix)