This ambivalence may regress into a fatalistic view of herself and her future.The less compatible a pair the greater the probability that their relationship will regress in the presence of another animal.Unable to think of anything else to do, I suggested to Eileen that we tried regressing her to her childhood.However, with every chime of the mighty Big Ben, the changed woman regresses back to her old villainous ways.The tumors regressed and then they appeared to stabilize.It's sort of the way things have regressed.→ See Verb table Examples from the Corpus regress The dieresis is not used over other vowels than e when re is prefixed : thus, reinforce, reunite, reabolish.From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English Related topics: Medicine regress re‧gress / rɪˈɡres / verb technical M BEHAVE to go back to an earlier and worse condition, or to a less developed way of behaving OPP progress The patient had regressed to a state of childish dependency. The hyphen is also sometimes used to bring out emphatically the sense of repetition or iteration : as, sung and re-sung. or else the second e has a dieresis over it: as, reëstablish, reëmbark, etc. Prefixed to a word beginning with e, re- is separated by a hyphen, as re-establish, re-estate, re-edify, etc. It was used from Middle English in forming words from Germanic as well as Latin elements ( rebuild, refill, reset, rewrite), and was used so even in Old French ( regret, regard, reward, etc.). In a few words it is reduced to r-, as in ransom (a doublet of redemption), rampart, etc.

recomfort (v.) 'to comfort, console encourage ' recourse (n.) 'a process, way, course.' Recover in Middle English also could mean 'obtain, win' (happiness, a kingdom, etc.) with no notion of getting something back, also 'gain the upper hand, overcome arrive at ' also consider the legal sense of recovery as 'obtain (property) by judgment or legal proceedings.'Īnd, due to sound changes and accent shifts, re- sometimes entirely loses its identity as a prefix ( rebel, relic, remnant, restive, rest (n.2) 'remainder,' rally (v.1) 'bring together'). There seem to have been more such words in Middle English than after, e.g. Often merely intensive, and in many of the older borrowings from French and Latin the precise sense of re- is forgotten, lost in secondary senses, or weakened beyond recognition, so that it has no apparent semantic content ( receive, recommend, recover, reduce, recreate, refer, religion, remain, request, require). OED writes that it is 'impossible to attempt a complete record of all the forms resulting from its use,' and adds that 'The number of these is practically infinite. The many meanings in the notion of 'back' give re- its broad sense-range: 'a turning back opposition restoration to a former state 'transition to an opposite state.' From the extended senses in 'again,' re- becomes 'repetition of an action,' and in this sense it is extremely common as a formative element in English, applicable to any verb.

In some English words from French and Italian re- appears as ra- and the following consonant is often doubled (see rally (v.1)). In earliest Latin the prefix became red- before vowels and h-, a form preserved in redact, redeem, redolent, redundant, redintegrate, and, in disguise, render (v.). Watkins (2000) describes this as a 'Latin combining form conceivably from Indo-European *wret-, metathetical variant of *wert- 'to turn.' De Vaan says the 'only acceptable etymology' for it is a 2004 explanation which reconstructs a root in PIE *ure 'back.' 1200, from Old French re- and directly from Latin re- an inseparable prefix meaning 'again back anew, against.' Word-forming element meaning 'back, back from, back to the original place ' also 'again, anew, once more,' also conveying the notion of 'undoing' or 'backward,' etc.

A synonym for regress