reconstruct

From re- +‎ construct.

• IPA^(key): /ˌɹiːkənˈstɹʌkt/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

reconstruct (third-person singular simple present reconstructs, present participle reconstructing, simple past and past participle reconstructed)

1. To construct again; to restore.
   • 1950 October, “Completion of Flood-Damage Repairs, East Coast Main Line”, in Railway Magazine, page 709:

     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.

   • 2016, Although valuable contributions were made by van der Tuuk, Brandstetter and others during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the foundation-laying work in Austronesian comparative linguistics was provided by Otto Dempwolff (1934-1938), who reconstructed a complete (but inadequate) sound system, and over 2,200 lexical reconstructions in the form of an Austronesian comparative dictionary. […] He did this by selecting just three languages, Tagalog, Toba Batak and Javanese, to reconstruct the phonology of ‘Uraustronesisch’ (Dempwolff 1934), and then testing the adequacy of this reconstruction with eight other languages scattered from Madagascar to Samoa (Dempwolff 1937), Austronesian Comparative Dictionary‎^[1]:
   • 2020 July 29, Paul Stephen, “A new collaboration centred on New Street”, in Rail, page 54:

     [...] 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. To attempt to understand an event by recreating or talking through the circumstances.

• “reconstruct”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.
• William Dwight Whitney, Benjamin E[li] Smith, editors (1911), “reconstruct”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., →OCLC.
• “reconstruct”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.

• constructer, corncutters