Recycling

How to spell recycling

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce recycling

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does recycling mean?

1. nounThe process of collecting and reprocessing used materials so they can be made into new products.
2. verbPresent participle of recycle: converting used items into reusable material.

Recycling in a sentence

• noun

  The council collects recycling from every house on a fortnightly schedule.

• verb

  By recycling her old newspapers, she cut the household waste in half.

• noun

  Glass and aluminium are well suited to recycling because they can be melted down repeatedly.

• verb

  The factory has been recycling scrap metal for over a decade.

Where does recycling come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The heart of this word is the Greek kyklos, meaning 'circle' or 'wheel', which gave English the word 'cycle' for anything that turns and returns to its starting point. To that base English added the prefix re-, meaning 'again', producing the verb 'recycle': literally to send something around the loop once more. The form 'recycling' is the gerund and present participle of that verb. The word is surprisingly young, emerging in industrial and technical use in the early twentieth century to describe feeding materials back through a process, and it only took on its now familiar environmental meaning, sorting waste so it can be reprocessed, in the second half of the century. The single c and the y both come straight from that Greek circle root, and remembering 'cycle' inside the word is the cleanest way to keep the spelling on track.

How the word is built

• re- (again)
• cycl (from Greek kyklos: circle, wheel)
• -ing (noun/verb suffix)