Reopen

How to spell reopen

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce reopen

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does reopen mean?

1. verbTo open again something that had been closed or shut.

Reopen in a sentence

• The council voted to reopen the library after the refurbishment.

• Please reopen the file so we can check the figures one more time.

Where does reopen come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a compound formed inside English by attaching the prefix re-, meaning 'again' or 'back', to the native verb 'open'. The base word 'open' descends from Old English 'open', an adjective and verb that meant 'not shut' or 'uncovered', and it is related to 'up', sharing the sense of something raised or lifted away. The prefix re- arrived from Latin, where it carried the meaning of repetition or return, and English absorbed it so thoroughly through borrowed words that it became a freely available building block for forming new ones. By the time 'reopen' is recorded in writing, around the 1700s, speakers were comfortably stacking re- onto everyday verbs to express doing the action a second time. The spelling trap is purely the join: it is one solid word with two e's in a row at the seam (re plus open), and there is no hyphen and no doubling.

How the word is built

• re- (again)
• open (from Old English open)