recuperate

English

Etymology

Borrowed from Latin recuperāre, alternative form of reciperāre (“get again, regain, recover”). Doublet of recover. The pronunciation without /j/ may have been influenced by the semantically similar, but etymologically distinct verb recoup.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ɹɪˈk(j)uːpəˌɹeɪt/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

Verb

recuperate (third-person singular simple present recuperates, present participle recuperating, simple past and past participle recuperated)

1. (intransitive) To recover, especially from an illness; to get better from an illness or from exhaustion (or sometimes from a financial loss, etc).
2. (transitive) To restore (someone or something) to health, strength, or currency; to revive or rehabilitate.
   • 1901, Edward Harper Parker, China, Her History, Diplomacy, and Commerce: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day, London : Murray, page 191:

     [...] of each province in 1842 and 1894 - that is, before the Taiping rebellion, and since China has recuperated her forces.

   • 2015 March 9, Gary Day, Jack Lynch, The Encyclopedia of British Literature, 3 Volume Set: 1660 - 1789, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 494:

     [...] one of many female poets who was trivialized and misrepresented for decades. When William Wordsworth recuperated her by praising her “Nocturnal Reverie,” he set what became a limiting factor in Finch's recovery: he treated her as a pre-Romantic ppoet of nature, and she became resituated in literary history as a much flatter or less complicated poet than she was in her lifetime.

3. (transitive) To recover; to regain.
   • 2015 August 1, Cristina Herrera, Paula Sanmartín, Reading/Speaking/Writing the Mother Text; Essays on Caribbean Women's Writing, Demeter Press, →ISBN:

     In LS, July emerges as a survivor and a storyteller with a traumatic past who has recuperated her relationship with her lost son. Her questioning and humorously subversive discourse gives emotional and textual depth to  […]

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:recuperate.
4. (sociology) To co-opt (a problematic or suspect idea) so that it becomes part of an accepted discourse; to reclaim.
   • 1991, Joseph Gabel, Karl Mannheim and Hungarian Marxism, page 87:

     Mannheim's purpose when elaborating his typology of ideology was, as we have seen above, to recuperate the concept of ideology for scientific politics, after having discarded elements of Manichean egocentricity.

   • 1999, Jonathan M. Hess, Reconstituting the Body Politic, page 24:

     She sought ultimately to recuperate the classical concept of the public realm against what she described, in negative terms, as the "rise of the social" characteristic of the modern world.

   • 2002, Roger Beebe, Denise Fulbrook, Ben Saunders, Rock Over the Edge: Transformations in Popular Music Culture:

     […] there is also the danger […] that such a critique recuperates gender in terms that quite literally invisiblize the very issues of race and ethnicity […]

   • 2020, Etienne S. Benson, Surroundings: A History of Environments and Environmentalisms, page 6:

     The fact that even many of the harshest critics of environmental thought have sought to somehow recuperate the concept reflects how deeply it has become embedded in our discourse.

Related terms

• recuperation
• recuperable

Translations

recover, especially from an illness — see recover

recover from illness

• Bulgarian: възстановявам се (vǎzstanovjavam se)
• Finnish: toipua (fi), parantua (fi)
• Maori: whakamāui
• Middle English: warysshen
• Polish: zdrowieć (pl) impf, wyzdrowieć (pl) pf

Further reading

• “recuperate”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.
• “recuperate”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC.
• “recuperate”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.

Italian

Etymology 1

Verb

recuperate

1. inflection of recuperare:
   1. second-person plural present indicative
   2. second-person plural imperative

Etymology 2

Participle

recuperate f pl

1. feminine plural of recuperato

Latin

Pronunciation

• (Classical Latin) IPA^(key): /re.ku.peˈraː.te/, [rɛkʊpɛˈräːt̪ɛ]
• (modern Italianate Ecclesiastical) IPA^(key): /re.ku.peˈra.te/, [rekupeˈräːt̪e]

Verb

recuperāte

1. second-person plural present active imperative of recuperō

Spanish

Verb

recuperate

1. second-person singular voseo imperative of recuperar combined with te