recapitulation

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. The act or process of recapitulating.
2. n. A summary or concise review.
3. n. See biogenesis.
4. n. Music Restatement or reworking of the exposition in the tonic, constituting the third and final section of the typical sonata form.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. The act or process of recapitulating.
2. n. In rhetoric, a summary or concise statement or enumeration of the principal points or facts in a preceding discourse, argument, or essay. Also anacephalæosis, enumeration. See epanodos.
3. n. In biology, the appearance in a developing organism of stages that are considered to recapitulate, or repeat in brief stages, the life-history of ancestors, or to resemble adult ancestors. See recapitulation doctrine.
4. n. In music, the third division of a movement in sonata form, in which the subjects are taken up afresh and both in the original key. Also called reprise.

Wiktionary

1. n. A subsequent brief recitement or enumeration of the major points in a narrative, article, or book.
2. n. music The third major section of a musical movement written in sonata form, representing thematic material that originally appeared in the exposition section.
3. n. biology The reenactment of the embryonic development in evolution of the species.
4. n. theology The symmetry provided by Christ's life to the teachings of the Old Testament; the summation of human experience in Jesus Christ.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. The act of recapitulating; a summary, or concise statement or enumeration, of the principal points, facts, or statements, in a preceding discourse, argument, or essay.
2. n. (Zoöl.) That process of development of the individual organism from the embryonic stage onward, which displays a parallel between the development of an individual animal (ontogeny) and the historical evolution of the species (phylogeny). Some authors recognize two types of recapitulation, palingenesis, in which the truly ancestral characters conserved by heredity are reproduced during development; and cenogenesis (kenogenesis or coenogenesis), the mode of individual development in which alterations in the development process have changed the original process of recapitulation and obscured the evolutionary pathway.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. emergence during embryonic development of various characters or structures that appeared during the evolutionary history of the strain or species
2. n. (music) the section of a composition or movement (especially in sonata form) in which musical themes that were introduced earlier are repeated
3. n. (music) the repetition of themes introduced earlier (especially when one is composing the final part of a movement)
4. n. a summary at the end that repeats the substance of a longer discussion