Other forms: recommended, recommends, recommending
To recommend something is to tell someone it is good and worth having. You recommend a film to a friend, a plumber to a neighbour, the fish to the table next to you.
Recommend also means to advise a course of action, and that use is cooler and more official: doctors recommend rest, the report recommends closing the road at night. The grammar traps learners. You recommend something TO somebody, and after the verb you use -ing or that — I recommend booking early, or I recommend that you book early, but never I recommend you to book. The noun is recommendation, which is both a suggestion in a report and a good word put in for a person. On packaging, recommended means suggested by someone who ought to know: recommended retail price, recommended daily amount.
1verbrecommendTo tell someone that something or someone is good and worth choosing.~7%
“Can you recommend a dentist near the station?”
synonyms: suggest
2verbadviseTo advise that something should be done.~91%
“The committee recommends that the road be closed at night.”
3verbseemTo make something seem worth choosing.~2%
“The flat is small, but the light and the low rent recommend it.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 15 sentences found in the wild and placed 15 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: suggest
Behind recommend stands Latin commendāre, made of con- with mandāre, and mandāre is itself manus, hand, plus dare, to give: to give into someone hand, to entrust. Add re- and it arrives through Old French recommender as recommend. When you recommend a restaurant you are, in the oldest picture, handing it over into someone keeping.
Latin
re-
Old French
recommender
Middle English
recommenden
English, today
recommend
Built from
From Middle English recommenden, from Old French recommender (compare French recommander), from Latin re- + commendo (“to commend, commit; to recommend”), from con- + mandāre, from manus + dare. Compare typologically препоръчам, препоручити, priporočiti, doporučit, odporučiť (the same meaning); поручи́ться, пору́ка, поручи́тельство (close meaning), all related to rǫka (ръка, рука́).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA