Recipient

How to spell recipient

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce recipient

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does recipient mean?

1. nounA person or thing that receives or is awarded something.

Recipient in a sentence

• The recipient of the scholarship was announced at the ceremony.

• Each recipient of the email was asked to confirm their attendance.

Where does recipient come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin recipiens, the present participle of recipere, a verb meaning 'to take back' or 'to receive'. That verb was built from re-, meaning 'back' or 'again', and capere, meaning 'to take', a root that also gave English 'capture', 'capable', and 'accept'. By the early 1500s English had adopted recipient to describe a person or thing that takes in or receives something, whether a gift, a payment, or, in older medical writing, a vessel that received distilled liquid. The c followed by i sounds like a soft 's' here, which is the spelling trap: writers may want to spell what they hear, so remembering the 'receive' family and the capere root keeps that c in place. The -ient ending, shared with words like 'patient' and 'ingredient', is the steady marker of someone or something on the receiving end of an action.

How the word is built

• re- (back)
• cip- (from capere: to take)
• -ient (agent suffix: one who does)