Dictionary

recuperate en · VERB

Pronunciation

• /ɹɪˈk(j)uːpəˌɹeɪt/
• (Southern-England) audio

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.

Meanings

1. (intransitive) To recover, especially from an illness; to get better from an illness or from exhaustion (or sometimes from a financial loss, etc).
   • As you recuperate, you’ll crave / the life lived by the knave, behave! 2026 May 26, “‘Today’ (A Tetraquartet) and Other Poetry by Paul Millan”, in The Society of Classical Poets:
2. (transitive) To restore (someone or something) to health, strength, or currency; to revive or rehabilitate.
   • [...] 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. 2015 March 9, Gary Day, Jack Lynch, The Encyclopedia of British Literature, 3 Volume Set: 1660 - 1789, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 494:
   • [...] of each province in 1842 and 1894 - that is, before the Taiping rebellion, and since China has recuperated her forces. 1901, Edward Harper Parker, China, Her History, Diplomacy, and Commerce: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day, London : Murray, page 191:
3. (transitive) To recover; to regain.
   • 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 […] 2015 August 1, Cristina Herrera, Paula Sanmartín, Reading/Speaking/Writing the Mother Text; Essays on Caribbean Women's Writing, Demeter Press, →ISBN:
4. To co-opt (a problematic or suspect idea) so that it becomes part of an accepted discourse; to reclaim.
   • 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. 1991, Joseph Gabel, Karl Mannheim and Hungarian Marxism, page 87:
   • […] there is also the danger […] that such a critique recuperates gender in terms that quite literally invisiblize the very issues of race and ethnicity […] 2002, Roger Beebe, Denise Fulbrook, Ben Saunders, Rock Over the Edge: Transformations in Popular Music Culture:
   • 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. 2020, Etienne S. Benson, Surroundings: A History of Environments and Environmentalisms, page 6:
   • 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. 1999, Jonathan M. Hess, Reconstituting the Body Politic, page 24:

Forms

Deriveds

unrecuperated · recuperator

Relateds

recuperable · recuperation

Translations (9)

es recuperarse (intransitive: recover, especially from an illness) · enm warysshen (intransitive: recover, especially from an illness) · bg възстановявам се (intransitive: recover, especially from an illness) · pl wyzdrowieć (intransitive: recover, especially from an illness) · mi whakamāui (intransitive: recover, especially from an illness) · fi parantua (intransitive: recover, especially from an illness) · es recuperar (transitive) · fi toipua (intransitive: recover, especially from an illness) · pl zdrowieć (intransitive: recover, especially from an illness)