Recycled

How to spell recycled

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce recycled

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does recycled mean?

1. verbProcessed used materials so they could be made into something new, rather than thrown away.
2. adjectiveMade from material that has been processed for reuse.

Recycled in a sentence

• verb

  The council recycled all the office paper it collected last quarter.

• adjective

  The shopping bag is made entirely from recycled plastic.

• verb

  She recycled the glass bottles instead of putting them in the bin.

• adjective

  They print the brochures on recycled paper to reduce waste.

Where does recycled come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word is built from the prefix re-, meaning 'again', and 'cycle', which traces back through Latin cyclus to the Greek kuklos, literally a 'circle' or 'wheel'. The verb 'recycle' was coined in the United States in the 1920s, originally an industrial term describing the return of a material to an earlier stage of a continuous process so it could pass through the cycle once more. Its modern environmental sense, meaning to process used items into reusable material, took hold strongly from the 1960s onward as conservation became a public concern. The form 'recycled' is simply the past tense and the adjective, made by adding the regular -ed ending. The spelling trap sits in the middle: the single 'c' followed by 'y' gives the soft 's' sound, while the doubled letters people sometimes expect never appear, so it stays neatly as re-cy-cled.

How the word is built

• re- (again)
• cycle (from Greek kuklos: circle, wheel)
• -ed (past tense / adjective suffix)