Replicate

How to spell replicate

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce replicate

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does replicate mean?

1. verbTo make an exact copy of something, or to repeat a process or experiment so it produces the same result.

Replicate in a sentence

• The lab struggled to replicate the original findings under the same conditions.

• The firm hoped to replicate last year's record sales in every region.

Where does replicate come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin verb replicare, meaning 'to fold back' or 'to repeat', formed from re- ('back' or 'again') and plicare ('to fold'). Its past participle, replicatus, gives us the modern English form with its -ate ending. The literal sense of folding something back over itself softened into the idea of doing a thing over again, which is how we arrive at the modern meaning of producing an exact copy or repeating a process. The same plicare root for folding survives in a whole family of relatives: 'reply' (originally to fold back an answer), 'replica', 'complicate', 'pliable', and even the humble 'ply'. The word settled into English by the 1400s, and remembering the buried 'fold' root in plic helps fix the single c in the middle, since there is no doubling here.

How the word is built

• re- (back, again)
• plic (fold)
• -ate (verb-forming suffix)