reclaim
pronunciation
How to pronounce reclaim in British English:
UK [rɪˈkleɪm]
How to pronounce reclaim in American English:
US [rɪˈkleɪm]
-
- Verb:
- claim back
- of materials from waste products
- bring, lead, or force to abandon a wrong or evil course of life, conduct, and adopt a right one
- make useful again; transform from a useless or uncultivated state
- overcome the wildness of; make docile and tractable
Word Origin
- reclaim (v.)
- early 14c., "call back a hawk to the glove," from Old French reclamer "to call upon, invoke; claim; seduce; to call back a hawk" (12c.) and directly from Latin reclamare "cry out against, contradict, protest, appeal," from re- "opposite, against" (see re-) + clamare "cry out" (see claim (v.)). "Call back a hawk," hence "to make tame" (mid-15c.), "subdue, reduce to obedience, make amenable to control" (late 14c.). In many Middle English uses with no sense of return or reciprocation. Meaning "revoke" (a grant, gift, etc.) is from late 15c. That of "recall (someone) from an erring course to a proper state" is mid-15c. Sense of "get back by effort" might reflect influence of claim. Meaning "bring waste land into useful condition fit for cultivation" first attested 1764, probably on notion of "reduce to obedience." Related: Reclaimed; reclaiming.
Example
- 1. In after the depression-era housing bust , dales writes , prices took 19 years to reclaim their previous peak .
- 2. Mr cameron wants to reclaim the streets , but residents demand more police where he intends to cut them .
- 3. And one other thing 's for sure : snow leopard uses substantially less disk storage than leopard , so you can reclaim some disk space too .
- 4. So the government , perversely , has an incentive to reclaim land on which to build .
- 5. Power cuts plunged the city into darkness , hampering efforts to reclaim the streets .