Reckon

How to spell reckon

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce reckon

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does reckon mean?

1. verbTo suppose, think, or be of the opinion that something is the case.
2. verbTo calculate or work out an amount, total, or estimate.

Reckon in a sentence

• Most managers reckon the meeting will run past lunch.

• The accountant tried to reckon the total cost of the project.

• Most of the team reckon the deadline is unrealistic.

• We need to reckon the distance before booking the flights.

Where does reckon come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Reckon comes from the Old English verb gerecenian, which meant 'to recount, relate, or arrange in proper order', and behind that lay the sense of counting things up. It belongs to a broad Germanic family: Dutch rekenen and German rechnen both still mean 'to calculate' or 'to do sums', so the arithmetical flavour of reckon is very old. Over the medieval period the English word broadened from literal counting of numbers to mean weighing matters up in the mind, and from there to 'consider', 'estimate', and the casual 'suppose' or 'think' heard in everyday speech today. The same root also gives us the noun 'reckoning', as in settling an account or facing the consequences. The spelling trap is the unstressed final syllable, which sounds like a vague 'un' but is written -on, plus the doubled hard sound captured by -ck-.

How the word is built

• reckon (a single native root from Old English gerecenian: to count up, recount, or put in order); the spelling keeps the hard -ck- and the unstressed -on ending