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reconstruct

verbattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˌɹiːkənˈstɹʌkt//
  • Canada//ˌɹikənˈstɹʌkt//
  • Australia//ˌɹiːkənˈstɹɐkt//

To construct again; to restore.

verb

  1. 1

    To construct again; to restore.

    As it was necessary to reconstruct the culvert close to the original position, the hazards of tunnelling through clay in an unstable condition, due to the absorption of water, had to be reduced by the application of electro-osmosis to dry out the material.

    The greatest number of bridges requiring modification are overline bridges, and many methods are adopted in reconstructing and altering them to give increased clearances.

    [object Object]

    […] after the original Victorian station was demolished and then entombed in concrete in the 1960s, Birmingham New Street became a byword for the worst excesses of the much-loathed Brutalist architecture so widely used to reconstruct inner-city post-war Britain.

  2. 2

    To attempt to understand an event by recreating, imagining, or talking through the circumstances.

    But reconstructing the scene among those silent walls in the precarious light, with the unforgotten ghosts of other crimes ready to emerge from every shadow, I can conceive that no more frightful spectre than this sombre being, dripping red from hands and face at every step, has ever walked.

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Italic *wre- Latin re-der. Old French re-bor. Middle English re- English re- Proto-Indo-European *ḱe? Proto-Indo-European *ḱóm Proto-Italic *kom Proto-Italic *kom- Latin con- Proto-Indo-European *ster- Proto-Indo-European *sterh₃- Proto-Indo-European *strew- Proto-Indo-European *-eti Proto-Indo-European *stréweti Proto-Italic *strowō Latin struō Latin cōnstruōder. Latin cōnstrūctusbor. English construct English reconstruct From re- + construct.

Forms

past tense
reconstructed
past participle
reconstructed
present participle
reconstructing
third person singular
reconstructs
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).