Recuperate Meaning
/ɹɪˈk(j)uːpəˌɹeɪt/Definition, CEFR level C2, pronunciation, examples, and quiz.
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Definition
verbTo recover, especially from an illness; to get better from an illness or from exhaustion (or sometimes from a financial loss, etc).
verbTo restore (someone or something) to health, strength, or currency; to revive or rehabilitate.
Sentence Examples
Sami has to stay in bed if he wants to recuperate.
Mary needs to stay in bed if she wants to recuperate.
CEFR Practice Quiz
After the accident, he needed several weeks to ____ and fully regain his strength.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
She traveled to the countryside to ____ after the surgery and regain her strength.
Word Origin & History
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.
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"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:
"[...] 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:
"[...] 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:
"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:
"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:
Explore More C2 Vocabulary Words
CEFR Practice Quiz
After the accident, he needed several weeks to ____ and fully regain his strength.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
She traveled to the countryside to ____ after the surgery and regain her strength.