Recognising

How to spell recognising

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce recognising

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does recognising mean?

1. verbIdentifying someone or something as already known, or formally acknowledging something.

Recognising in a sentence

• She had trouble recognising her old colleague after so many years apart.

• The new software is very good at recognising handwriting on scanned forms.

Where does recognising come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the present participle of 'recognise', which traces back to the Latin verb recognoscere, meaning 'to know again' or 'to recall'. That verb was built from re-, meaning 'again', and cognoscere, meaning 'to get to know' or 'to learn', itself a compound of com- (an intensifying 'thoroughly') and gnoscere, 'to come to know'. English picked the word up in the late 1400s and early 1500s, partly through Old French reconoistre, and it first carried the legal sense of formally acknowledging or admitting something. The same gnoscere root sits behind a whole family of English words including 'cognition', 'incognito' and even 'note' and 'notice', all built on the idea of knowing. The British -ise ending here reflects the French-influenced spelling tradition, whereas the -ize form (recognizing) closer to the Greek-derived suffix is standard in American and Canadian writing.

How the word is built

• re- (again)
• cogn (from Latin cognoscere: to know)
• -ise (verb suffix)
• -ing (present participle)

British and American spelling

Recognising is the British spelling. American English spells it recognizing.