recapitulation love

Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The act or process of recapitulating.
  • noun A summary or concise review.
  • noun Music Restatement or reworking of the exposition in the tonic, constituting the third and final section of the typical sonata form.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun In biology, the appearance in a developing organism of stages that are considered to recapitulate, or repeat in brief stages, the life-history of ancestors, or to resemble adult ancestors. See recapitulation doctrine.
  • noun In music, the third division of a movement in sonata form, in which the subjects are taken up afresh and both in the original key. Also called reprise.
  • noun The act or process of recapitulating.
  • noun In rhetoric, a summary or concise statement or enumeration of the principal points or facts in a preceding discourse, argument, or essay. Also anacephalæosis, enumeration. See epanodos.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The act of recapitulating; a summary, or concise statement or enumeration, of the principal points, facts, or statements, in a preceding discourse, argument, or essay.
  • noun (Zoöl.) That process of development of the individual organism from the embryonic stage onward, which displays a parallel between the development of an individual animal (ontogeny) and the historical evolution of the species (phylogeny). Some authors recognize two types of recapitulation, palingenesis, in which the truly ancestral characters conserved by heredity are reproduced during development; and cenogenesis (kenogenesis or coenogenesis), the mode of individual development in which alterations in the development process have changed the original process of recapitulation and obscured the evolutionary pathway.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A subsequent brief recitement or enumeration of the major points in a narrative, article, or book.
  • noun music The third major section of a musical movement written in sonata form, representing thematic material that originally appeared in the exposition section.
  • noun biology The reenactment of the embryonic development in evolution of the species.
  • noun theology The symmetry provided by Christ's life to the teachings of the Old Testament; the summation of human experience in Jesus Christ.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun emergence during embryonic development of various characters or structures that appeared during the evolutionary history of the strain or species
  • noun (music) the section of a composition or movement (especially in sonata form) in which musical themes that were introduced earlier are repeated
  • noun (music) the repetition of themes introduced earlier (especially when one is composing the final part of a movement)
  • noun a summary at the end that repeats the substance of a longer discussion

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Anglo-Norman recapitulaciun et al., Middle French recapitulacion et al., or their source, from Late Latin recapitulatio ("summing up, summary"), from the participle stem of recapitulare ("recapitulate"), from re- + capitulum ("chapter, section"), diminutive of caput ("head").

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word recapitulation.

Examples

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.

  • "This is the theory of recapitulation, or what is sometimes called the biogenetic law: ontogeny (the development of the individual organism) recapitulates phylogeny (the evolutionary history of the entire group)." from The Metaphysical Club

    October 16, 2021