Recap

How to spell recap

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce recap

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does recap mean?

1. verbTo summarise the main points of something already said or done.
2. nounA short summary of the main points of an event, discussion, or programme.

Recap in a sentence

• verb

  Let me recap the key decisions before we close the meeting.

• noun

  The email ended with a brief recap of the action items.

• verb

  The presenter took a moment to recap the previous episode for new viewers.

• noun

  The sports channel aired a recap of the weekend matches.

Where does recap come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Recap is a twentieth-century shortening of recapitulate, which English took from the Latin verb recapitulare, meaning 'to restate by main points'. That Latin word was built from re-, meaning 'again', and capitulum, meaning 'little head' or 'chapter', itself a diminutive of caput, the Latin word for 'head'. The underlying idea was to run back over the 'heads', that is the chief points, of something already said, much as a chapter heading flags the main matter that follows. The clipped form recap surfaced in journalism and broadcasting around the early 1900s as a brisk label for a summary of what had gone before. The same caput root sits inside familiar words like capital, captain, and decapitate, all turning on the notion of a head; remembering that 'cap' here means a heading, not a lid, helps fix the single c and single p in the spelling.

How the word is built

• re- (again)
• cap (from capitulum: little head, chapter, hence the heads of an argument)