Recur or reoccur?
recur is a verb meaning “Of an event, situation, etc.: to appear or happen again, especially repeatedly”; reoccur is a verb meaning “To occur again; to recur”. In written English (wordfreq, 2021 data) recur is about 5.9 times as common as reoccur.
What is the difference between recur and reoccur?
| recur | reoccur | |
|---|---|---|
| Part of speech | verb | verb |
| Meaning | Of an event, situation, etc.: to appear or happen again, especially repeatedly Of a disease or symptom: to happen again, especially repeatedly or after a remission or an apparent recovery | To occur again; to recur |
| Example | The theme of the prodigal son recurs later in the third act | none recorded |
| Forms | recurs, recurring, recurred | reoccurs, reoccurring, reoccurred |
| Pronunciation | /ɹɪˈkɜː/ /ɹɪˈkɜɹ/ /ɹɪˈkɛː/ | not recorded |
| In writing | about once in every 2 million words | about once in every 13 million words |
Sources: recur and reoccur in the English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0); written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Every current meaning of recur and reoccur
recur
- 1
Of an event, situation, etc.: to appear or happen again, especially repeatedly
The theme of the prodigal son recurs later in the third act
- 2
Of a disease or symptom: to happen again, especially repeatedly or after a remission or an apparent recovery
- 3
Of a memory, thought, etc.: to come to the mind again
- 4
datedTo speak, think, or write about something again; to go back or return to a memory, a subject, etc
- 5
Synonym of recurse (“to execute a procedure recursively”)
- 6
Often in the form recurring following a number: of a numeral or group of numerals in a decimal fraction: to repeat indefinitely
One-third can be written in decimal form as 0.3333 …, or point three-recurring
reoccur
- 1
To occur again; to recur
Source: the English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0); obsolete, archaic, dialect and rare senses left out.
Which is more common, recur or reoccur?
recur appears about once in every 2 million words; reoccur about once in every 13 million words.
recur about once in every 2 million wordsreoccur about once in every 13 million words
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
How many people search recur vs reoccur?
“recur vs reoccur” is searched about 230 times a month on Bing (Google reports it together with close variants, so it has no figure of its own) in the United States.
Sources: Google Ads keyword data through DataForSEO and Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, the average month from September 2025 to August 2026.