recursion
/ɹɪˈkɜː(ɹ)ʒən/noun
recursion is spelled R-E-C-U-R-S-I-O-N. The wrong spelling people search most is recussion: about 20 Bing searches a month in the United States (September 2025 to August 2026), about 1 in 79 of all searches for the word. Recursion is a noun meaning “The act of recurring”. The plural of recursion is recursions.
How many letters and syllables are in recursion?
| Letters | 9: R-E-C-U-R-S-I-O-N |
|---|---|
| In writing | about once in every 2 million words; the 44,209th most frequent word form |
| Wrong spellings searched | 1; the most searched, recussion, about 20 Bing searches a month (all of them) |
Sources: letters and syllables from the English Wiktionary's hyphenation or pronunciation; written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media); Bing searches in the United States: the average month from September 2025 to August 2026 (Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, read September 30, 2026).
How do you spell recursion?
Recursion is spelled R-E-C-U-R-S-I-O-N. One wrong spelling is searched or written often enough to measure; together they are about 1 in 79 of the searches for recursion in either form.
Bing searches in the United States: the average month from September 2025 to August 2026 (Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, read September 30, 2026). Wrong spellings are taken from Wiktionary entries tagged "misspelling" and its obsolete or nonstandard forms, Wikipedia's Lists of common misspellings and the codespell dictionary, then measured. The proofreader's marks show the change that corrects each one.
How common is recursion?
Recursion appears about once in every 2 million words in written English, the 44,209th most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
How do you pronounce recursion?
- /ɹɪˈkɜː(ɹ)ʒən/
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-us-recursion.ogg, LL-Q1860_(eng)-Vealhurl-recursion.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Forms of recursion
- recursions plural
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
What does recursion mean?
The meanings the English Wiktionary records, quoted as written there (source below).
noun
- 1
The act of recurring.
- 2
The act of defining an object (usually a function) in terms of that object itself.
n! = n × (n − 1)! (for n > 0) or 1 (for n = 0) defines the factorial function using recursion.
- 3
The invocation of a procedure from within itself.
This function uses recursion to compute factorials.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
Recursion in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
| Language | Words |
|---|---|
| Portuguese | recorrência, recursão |
| Spanish | recursión , recurrencia |
| German | Rekursion |
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.
Where does recursion come from?
Borrowed from Latin recursiō (“the act of running back or again, return”), from recurrō (“run back; return”), from re- (“back, again”) + currō (“run”).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).