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OneKitly

rethink

verbnounattested in dialogue

  • //ɹiːˈθɪŋk//
  • /[ɹʷɪi̯ˈθɪŋk]/

To think again about something, with the intention of changing or replacing it.

verb

  1. 1

    To think again about something, with the intention of changing or replacing it.

    Disability rights advocates are encouraging people to rethink the words "crazy" and "insane" as they stigmatize mental health.

    There's a myth that incest survivors are an extremely small percentage of the gay male community. But that belief is something that needs to be rethought. One in six men (gay and straight) polled in a 1985 Los Angeles Times survey reported being sexually abused before the age of 18.

    But the NCC has been forced to rethink its approach and has already extended the deadline three times, at short notice.

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Italic *wre- Latin re-der. Old French re-bor. Middle English re- English re- Proto-Indo-European *teng-der. Proto-Germanic *þankijaną Proto-West Germanic *þankijan Old English þenċan Middle English thinken English think English rethink From re- + think.

noun

  1. 1

    The act of thinking again about something.

    This business plan of yours looks risky. It needs a rethink.

    Guardiola needed a rethink and his hand was forced when De Bruyne was forced off in the 58th minute after a check by Rüdiger.

    There was a complete rethink in 2020, following a review into why costs rose by £100 million in the space of a year.

Forms

plural
rethinks
past tense
rethought
past participle
rethought
present participle
rethinking
third person singular
rethinks
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).