Resurrect

How to spell resurrect

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce resurrect

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does resurrect mean?

1. verbTo bring something back into use, existence, or activity after it has ended or been forgotten.

Resurrect in a sentence

• The council voted to resurrect the abandoned market scheme.

• She hoped to resurrect her stalled career with a bold new project.

Where does resurrect come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This verb is a back-formation from the much older noun 'resurrection', which English took through Old French from the Latin resurrectio, meaning 'a rising again'. At its core sits the Latin verb resurgere, built from the prefix re-, meaning 'again', and surgere, meaning 'to rise' or 'to lift up'; that same surgere also gave us 'surge' and 'insurgent'. For centuries English had only the noun, with its strong religious sense of rising from the dead, before writers in the early 1700s trimmed it down to make the plain verb 'resurrect'. The doubled letters are the spelling trap: a single -s- after the prefix but a doubled -rr- in the middle, mirroring the Latin resurrectus. Knowing that the body of the word is 'surrect', the raised-up part, helps fix both the single s and the double r in memory.

How the word is built

• re- (again)
• surrect- (from Latin surrectus, raised up, past participle of surgere 'to rise')