Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- v. To repeat in concise form.
- v. Biology To appear to repeat (the evolutionary stages of the species) during the embryonic development of the individual organism.
- v. To make a summary.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- To repeat, as the principal things mentioned in a preceding discourse, argument, or essay; give a summary of the principal facts, points, or arguments of; mention or relate in brief.
- Synonyms Recapitulate, Repeat, Recite, Rehearse, Reiterate. Recapitulate is a precise word, applying to the formal or exact naming of points that have been with some exactness named before: as, it is often well after an extended argument, to recapitulate the heads. In this it differs from repeat, recite, rehears, which are freer in their use. To reiterate is to say a thing a second time or oftener.
- To repeat in brief what has already been said.
- In biology, to repeat ancestral evolutionary stages: said of young animals in their early development.
Wiktionary
- v. to summarize or repeat in concise form
- v. to repeat the evolutionary stages of an organism during its embryonic development
GNU Webster's 1913
- v. To repeat, as the principal points in a discourse, argument, or essay; to give a summary of the principal facts, points, or arguments of; to relate in brief; to summarize.
- v. To sum up, or enumerate by heads or topics, what has been previously said; to repeat briefly the substance.
WordNet 3.0
- v. repeat an earlier theme of a composition
- v. repeat stages of evolutionary development during the embryonic phase of life
- v. summarize briefly
Etymologies
- From Late Latin recapitulatus, past participle of recapitulare ("to go over the main points of a thing again"), from Latin re- ("again") + capitulum ("a head, main part, chapter"); see capitulate. (Wiktionary)
- Latin recapitulāre, recapitulāt- : re-, re- + capitulum, main point, heading, diminutive of caput, capit-, head; see kaput- in Indo-European roots. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“Most first generation immigrants will be able to understand more English than you think, but for them to process it and recapitulate, that is more than they are willing to do, it is just plain hard!”
“We have thus been able to largely recapitulate several centuries of painstaking manual labor with our automated method, the Israeli team announced in a paper presented last week in Portland, Oregon, at the annual conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics.”
“Any state-level insurance efforts will recapitulate that pattern.”
“Social historians like Clare Graves and Jean Gebser have developed developmental models that show how human individuals and cultures recapitulate individual growth through archaic, magical, mythical-tribal, modernist, post-modernist and onto integral value structures.”
Sunday Salon: “What Good are the Arts” by John Carey: Some musings Part 2
“I do not need to recapitulate your own record for you, but I wish to ensure that everybody here knows how well you have served the Romulan people.”
Simon & Schuster: Star Trek: Typhon Pact: Rough Beasts of Empire
“To recapitulate in short what I've written in the past:”
The Huffington Post: Tony Jones: The Church Should Stay Out Of The Marriage Business
“Google hopes to recapitulate this history in smartphone software.”
“I think when gamers are upset about a video game movie being awful, they aren't saying 'that game was awesome film material, how could they mess it up!?' they're more saying, 'why do book adaptations get better writers who know what works in film and what doesn't while all we get is someone who tries to recapitulate plot points/action sequences from the game”
“We have had and still have fascinating discussions on 'sf vis a vis mythology' amongst Indian sf buffs and it would perhaps be worthwhile to recapitulate that discussion here.”
“To recapitulate, the struggle for secession did involve a few thousand committed anti-Soviet nationalists.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘recapitulate’.
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GRE Barrons Wordlist
A complete Barron's Wordlist for GRE preparation. Your online flashcard replacement.
abase, abash, abate, abbreviate, abdicate, aberrant, aberration, abet, abeyance, abhor, abject, abjure and 4087 more...
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Do That Again! ~~ "Re-verbs"
List of verbs that begin with re-, meaning to repeat a specific action or process - reappraise, for example.
I'm also looking for words like repeat, replenish and rescind whose roots d...repeat, rescind, reappraise, refinish, restripe, reapply, resupply, refurbish, reposition, reoffend, redistribute, recoat and 202 more...
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allover
reintegrate, spight, surveillant, harmonize, Colophon, workplace, bigoted, unsighted, bridgework, salutation, voltmeter, octane and 159 more...
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GRE 2014
abase, abate, abdicate, aberrant, abeyance, abhor, abjure, abortive, abound, abrasive, abreast, abridge and 1577 more...
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SAT Words
But only the ones that I don't already know.
abase, abash, abominate, abstruse, acclivity, accolade, accost, adroit, adulate, adulterate, adumbrate, affray and 241 more...
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GRE
predilection, explicit, appeal, supplication, appealing, enchanting, ovation, pertinent, apropos, opportunely, applicable, germane and 381 more...
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D4Divine's list
idiosyncratic, unfathomable, easement, plenary, trenchant, extracurially, periphrastic, prima facie, usurp, vacuous, unctuous, recapitulate and 16 more...
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mckenna
eschaton, rusticate, sonata, plenum, adumbration, shockwave, peregrination, manifold, ingression, dross, negrato, crenulated and 30 more...
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man gre
abase, abeyance, abreast, abscission, abscond, abyss, accede, accretion, acerbic, acidulous, acumen, adulterate and 483 more...
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GRE
GRE words from Princeton Review guide, ETS GRE Book from 2010 (for revised test), New Yorker/NY Times articles.
sycophant, obsequious, volubility, equanimity, enervate, effrontery, impertinent, platitude, impudence, quiescent, propitiate, equivocate and 124 more...
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scholarly writing words
decrement, replete, impel, iterative, subsume, tacit, vex, denote, impart, ascertain, coalesce, extant and 49 more...
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big book gre
abase, abbess, abbey, abbot, abdicate, abdomen, abdominal, abduction, abed, aberration, abet, abeyance and 6691 more...
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gre2
aberrant, aberration, aboveboard, abrasive, abstemious, acme, admonish, affable, affluent, alacrity, allegory, alleviate and 1907 more...
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SAT Words
But only the ones that I don't already know.
abase, abash, abominate, abstruse, acclivity, accolade, accost, adroit, adulate, adulterate, adumbrate, affray and 241 more...
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Words To Use In Creative Writing
hag-ridden, light-heeled, wendigo, longshanks, fatuous, insipid, sodden, bulging, sycophantic, uncourtly, gauche, assuasive and 102 more...
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What Do You Mean ?
U Gotta Know These.......
falter, ruddy, flounder, pallid, fumble, founder, labile, titular, tacit, pragmatic, fatalism, jaded and 112 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for recapitulate.
ruzuzu "Biology To appear to repeat (the evolutionary stages of the species) during the embryonic development of the individual organism."
- American Heritage Dictionary Jul 20, 2010