Recycle

How to spell recycle

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce recycle

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does recycle mean?

1. verbTo process used materials so that they can be made into new products.

Recycle in a sentence

• The council asks residents to recycle glass and cardboard each week.

• Many offices now recycle paper to cut down on waste.

Where does recycle come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word is a modern compound, built from the prefix re-, meaning 'again', and 'cycle', which traces back to the Greek kuklos, meaning 'circle' or 'wheel'. That Greek root reached English through Latin cyclus and Old French, carrying the idea of something turning round and returning to its start. 'Recycle' itself is comparatively young: it appeared in the early twentieth century in industrial and chemical contexts, where it described passing a material back through a process to use it again. From the 1960s onward, as environmental awareness grew, the word took on its now familiar everyday sense of reprocessing waste such as glass, paper, and plastic into new products. The spelling stays regular because the 'cycle' element is left intact after the prefix, so the only trap is remembering the single 'c' in re- joining the 'cy' of cycle.

How the word is built

• re- (again)
• cycle (from Greek kuklos: circle, wheel)