Word.ws English Dictionary

precapitulate

precapitulate verb: to preemptively capitulate.

Verb

precapitulate (third-person singular simple present precapitulates, present participle precapitulating, simple past and past participle precapitulated)

  1. To preemptively capitulate.
    • It is clear that he also reads PM, which is probably what enables him to "precapitulate to a point the history of most intelligent and sensitive men today."1947, Accent: A Quarterly of New Literature, Volumes 8-9, volumes 8-9, Accent, page 188
    • Worse, rational reconstruction philosophers have tended to think of all phases of the research process in terms of the logical structure of the final products of research as expounded in the latest textbook. To coin a term, formalists have assumed that history must ‘precapitulate’ their logic....1989 May 18, David Gooding, Trevor Pinch, Simon Schaffer, “Justification and experiment”, in The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences, illustrated, reprint edition, Cambridge...

Examples of precapitulate in a sentence

  • To coin a term, formalists have assumed that history must ‘precapitulate’ their logic.1989 May 18, David Gooding, Trevor Pinch, Simon Schaffer, “Justification and experiment”, in The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural...
  • DNA has given us the equipment to recapitulate–precapitulate the major DNA solutions—past and future.2009 June 15, Timothy Leary, “CASTES”, in Evolutionary Agents, Ronin Publishing, →ISBN, page 29:
  • Greta sages precapitulate, the central nervous system as communicating via RNA with DNA.2013 January 23, Joshua Morris, Acorns: Windows High-Tide Foghat, Volume 4, volume 4, iUniverse, →ISBN:
  • We might say it brings the ability to ‘preconstitute’ and ‘precapitulate’¹³ our future, if we are able to think of it as extending itself out from the ordinary temporal reach of our notions of time.2016 April 8, Koral Ward, Augenblick: The Concept of the 'Decisive Moment' in 19th- and 20th-Century Western Philosophy, reprint edition...

Forms of precapitulate

third-person singular presentprecapitulates
present participleprecapitulating
past participleprecapitulated
pastprecapitulated

Origin of precapitulate

From pre- + capitulate.

Questions about precapitulate

What does precapitulate mean?
Precapitulate means to preemptively capitulate.
How do you use precapitulate in a sentence?
To coin a term, formalists have assumed that history must ‘precapitulate’ their logic.
What part of speech is precapitulate?
Precapitulate is a verb.
What is the past tense of precapitulate?
The past tense of precapitulate is precapitulated.

Words near precapitulate in the dictionary

  1. precapillary
  2. precapitalism
  3. precapitalist
  4. precapitalistic
  5. precapitalists
  6. precapitulate
  7. precapitulated
  8. precapitulates
  9. precapitulating
  10. precaps
  11. precapsular

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: precapitulate (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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