recapitulation

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for recapitulation is 14 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˌɹiːkəˌpɪtjʊˈleɪʃ(ə)n/. Corpus data places it at rank #73,577 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it. Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

No misspelling variants are generated for recapitulation in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Anglo-Norman recapitulaciun et al., Middle French recapitulacion et al., or their source, from Late Latin recapitulatio (“summing up, summary”), from the participle stem of recapitulare (“recapitulate”), from re- + capitulum (“chapter, section”), dimin… Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is recapitulation, spelled R-E-C-A-P-I-T-U-L-A-T-I-O-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.