recovering

Pluralrecoverings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle of recover.

   He spent the summer recovering from a broken leg.

   The economy is slowly recovering after the downturn.

   Note

   Before a noun, the participle works like an adjective and marks a process still underway: a recovering drug addict is someone in the middle of getting well. The same spelling also serves as a gerund that takes a direct object (recovering the files took hours). Don't confuse it with the countable noun, which follows an article, usually takes of, and has a plural, recoverings.

2. 2
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The process or an instance of regaining something, or of returning to a normal, healthy, or original state.

   The recovering of stolen artifacts proved to be a long legal ordeal.

   A full recovering of the corrupted files was impossible after the crash.

   Similarrecovery, retrieval, restoration

   Oppositeloss

   Note

   A verbal noun with a long history: Middle English already had recoveryng, built from recover plus -ing. It names regaining as an action or an episode rather than a settled result. In plain prose it usually takes of (the recovering of stolen artifacts). Its plural can turn poetic, as in Donald Smith's A Long Stride Shortens the Road (2004), which speaks of "recoverings of race and memory."

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