Reclaimed

How to spell reclaimed

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce reclaimed

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does reclaimed mean?

1. verbPast tense of reclaim: to have recovered or taken back something that was lost, given up, or previously possessed.
2. adjectiveDescribing material that has been recovered from previous use and prepared for reuse.

Reclaimed in a sentence

• verb

  After the appeal, she reclaimed the deposit the landlord had withheld.

• adjective

  The kitchen worktop was built from reclaimed oak salvaged from an old barn.

• verb

  Engineers reclaimed several acres of marsh for the new housing estate.

• adjective

  The jacket is made from reclaimed ocean plastic.

Where does reclaimed come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the past tense and past participle of 'reclaim', which English took from the Old French reclamer in the 1300s, itself descended from the Latin reclamare. That Latin verb was built from the prefix re-, meaning 'back' or 'against', and clamare, meaning 'to call out' or 'to cry'; literally it meant 'to cry out against' or 'to call back'. The earliest English uses leaned on the falconry sense of calling a hawk back to the wrist, and from there the meaning broadened to recovering or retrieving something that was lost, taken, or run wild. The modern senses, such as draining marshland for farming or salvaging old timber, all grow from that core idea of calling something back into useful order. The same clamare root sits inside 'claim', 'exclaim', and 'clamour', which is a handy reminder that the middle of the word is spelled c-l-a-i-m, not c-l-a-m-e.

How the word is built

• re- (back, again)
• claim (from Latin clamare: to call or cry out)
• -ed (past tense/participle suffix)