Recover

How to spell recover

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce recover

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does recover mean?

1. verbTo return to a normal state of health, strength, or condition after illness or difficulty.
2. verbTo get back something that was lost, stolen, or taken away.

Recover in a sentence

• It took her several weeks to recover from the surgery.

• The police managed to recover the stolen laptop within a day.

• The economy began to recover once interest rates fell.

• Divers worked for hours to recover the wreck from the seabed.

Where does recover come from?

Language of origin: French

Recover came into English in the 1300s from the Old French recovrer, which itself descended from the Latin recuperare, meaning 'to get back' or 'to regain'. That Latin verb is built on the prefix re-, meaning 'back' or 'again', joined to a root tied to receiving or taking again, and it is the same source that gives us the more bookish word 'recuperate'. In Middle English the sense settled on regaining what had been lost: lost health, lost property, or lost ground. Although the spelling looks as though it is simply re- placed in front of 'cover', the two senses split apart over time, so that putting a fresh cover on something is now usually written 're-cover' with a hyphen. The single-word recover keeps the older meaning of getting something back, and the steady, unstressed second syllable is what trips writers, since it is easy to leave the spelling underweighted.

How the word is built

• re- (back, again)
• cover (from Latin cooperire: to cover over)