Recruit

How to spell recruit

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce recruit

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does recruit mean?

1. verbTo enlist or take on new members, employees, or soldiers for an organisation or cause.
2. nounA newly enlisted or newly joined member of a group, especially the armed forces or a workplace.

Recruit in a sentence

• verb

  The firm hopes to recruit several engineers before the summer.

• noun

  Each new recruit was issued a uniform and a training schedule.

• verb

  The charity needs to recruit more volunteers for the weekend shelter.

• noun

  The raw recruit struggled with the early morning drills at first.

Where does recruit come from?

Language of origin: French

Recruit traces back to the Latin verb crescere, meaning 'to grow', the same root that gives us 'increase' and 'crescent'. From this came the French recrue, literally 'a fresh growth' or 'new shoot', which soldiers borrowed as a vivid metaphor for the fresh men who made an army grow again after losses in battle. English took the word in the early 1600s, first as a military term for replenishing the ranks, and the meaning soon broadened from soldiers to any new member brought into a group or organisation. The hidden trap is that the spelling preserves the French 'cru' followed by 'it', so the word ends 'cruit' rather than the 'croot' or 'crewt' that the ear might suggest. Keeping the 'growing again' image in mind, re- plus the grow root, helps explain why that unexpected 'ui' sits in the middle.

How the word is built

• re- (again)
• cru- (from Latin crescere: to grow)
• -it