Word.ws English Dictionary

re-cognize

re-cognize is the alternative spelling of recognize.

Meaning of recognize

Verb

recognize (third-person singular simple present recognizes, present participle recognizing, simple past and past participle recognized)

  1. (British, English, Oxford, US, transitive) To match (something or someone which one currently perceives) to a memory of some previous encounter with the same person or thing.
    • I recognized his face immediately, although his voice was different.
    Synonyms:
    place
  2. (British, English, Oxford, US, transitive) To acknowledge the existence or legality of; to treat as valid or worthy of consideration.
    • The US and a number of EU countries are expected to recognize Kosovo on Monday.
  3. (British, English, Oxford, US, transitive, or with clause) To acknowledge or consider (as being a certain thing or having a certain quality or property).
    • Slavery is widely recognized as immoral.
  4. (British, English, Oxford, US, transitive) To realize or discover the nature of something; apprehend quality in.
    • In plants, the ability to recognize self from nonself plays an important role in fertilization, because self-fertilization will result in less diverse offspring than fertilization with pollen from another individual.2013 May-June, Katrina G. Claw, “Rapid Evolution in Eggs and Sperm”, in American Scientist, volume 101, number 3
  5. (British, English, Oxford, US, transitive) To show formal appreciation of, as with an award, commendation etc.
    • His services were recognized in a testimonial.
  6. (British, English, Oxford, US, obsolete) To review; to examine again.
    • We do moste humbly submytte it [this treatise] to[…]your maiestie, to be recognised, ouersene, and corrected.1534, Thomas Cranmer, The Institution of a Christian Man

See all 9 meanings of recognize

Forms of re-cognize

third-person singular presentre-cognizes
present participlere-cognizing
past participlere-cognized
pastre-cognized

Questions about re-cognize

What is re-cognize the alternative spelling of?
Re-cognize is the alternative spelling of recognize.

Words near re-cognize in the dictionary

  1. re-cloning
  2. re-cognise
  3. re-cognised
  4. re-cognises
  5. re-cognising
  6. re-cognize
  7. re-cognized
  8. re-cognizes
  9. re-cognizing
  10. re-collect
  11. re-combine

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: re-cognize (page history and authors); recognize (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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Cite this entry: “re-cognize.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/re-cognize. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.