Reuse

How to spell reuse

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce reuse

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does reuse mean?

1. verbTo use something again, rather than discarding it after a single use.
2. nounThe act of using something again.

Reuse in a sentence

• verb

  The office encourages staff to reuse envelopes for internal post.

• noun

  The council promotes the reuse of building materials wherever possible.

• verb

  You can reuse the leftover paint on the garden fence.

• noun

  The design allows for easy reuse of every component.

Where does reuse come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is a compound of the prefix re-, meaning 'again' or 'back', and the verb 'use'. The 'use' element traces to the Latin verb uti, meaning 'to make use of' or 'to employ', whose past participle gave the noun usus, 'a using'. English took 'use' from Old French user in the 1200s, and the re- prefix, also inherited from Latin through French, was freely attached to native and borrowed words alike to signal repetition. 'Reuse' itself is a fairly transparent later formation, recorded in English from around the 1600s, and it gained fresh currency in the twentieth century alongside recycling and conservation. The spelling trap is purely visual: the meeting of the 'e' in re- and the 'u' in use creates the 'eu' cluster that can look wrong, even though no letters are doubled or dropped.

How the word is built

• re- (again)
• use (from Latin uti 'to use')