Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- intransitive verb To repeat in concise form.
- intransitive verb Biology To appear to repeat (the evolutionary stages of the species) during the embryonic development of the individual organism.
- intransitive verb To make a summary.
from The Century Dictionary.
- 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, rehearse, 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.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- intransitive verb To sum up, or enumerate by heads or topics, what has been previously said; to repeat briefly the substance.
- transitive verb 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.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- verb to
summarize or repeat in concise form - verb to repeat the evolutionary stages of an organism during its embryonic development
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- verb repeat an earlier theme of a composition
- verb repeat stages of evolutionary development during the embryonic phase of life
- verb summarize briefly
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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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!
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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 2009
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Google hopes to recapitulate this history in smartphone software.
The Many Wars of Google Jr. Holman W. Jenkins 2011
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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.
Star Trek: Typhon Pact: Rough Beasts of Empire David R. George III 2011
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To recapitulate in short what I've written in the past:
Tony Jones: The Church Should Stay Out Of The Marriage Business Tony Jones 2011
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Any state-level insurance efforts will recapitulate that pattern.
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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.
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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.
Star Trek: Typhon Pact: Rough Beasts of Empire David R. George III 2011
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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.
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To recapitulate in short what I've written in the past:
Tony Jones: The Church Should Stay Out Of The Marriage Business Tony Jones 2011
ruzuzu commented on the word recapitulate
"Biology To appear to repeat (the evolutionary stages of the species) during the embryonic development of the individual organism."
- American Heritage Dictionary
July 20, 2010