recur

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for recur is 5 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɹɪˈkɜː/. Corpus data places it at rank #44,442 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 11 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for recur, with forms such as "ercur", "rceur", and "reccur". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "Reus", "refer", "revue", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Learned borrowing from Latin recurrō (“to hurry or run back; to return, revert”), from re- (prefix meaning ‘back, backwards’) + currō (“to hasten, hurry; to move, travel; to run”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *ḱers- (“to run”)). cognates * Anglo-Nor… 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 recur, spelled R-E-C-U-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.