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recourse

UK/ɹɪˈkɔːs/US/ˈɹiːkɔɹs/
nounC2Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,348 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: recourses

Recourse is the help or remedy you can turn to. Have recourse to, without recourse, legal recourse.

It appears in two fixed phrases: have recourse to something means to fall back on it, and no recourse means there is nothing you can do. In finance, without recourse on a document means the buyer cannot come back to the seller if the debt goes bad.

Definitions of recourse

  1. 1nounrecourseThe help or remedy you can turn to.C2

    “When the airline lost our bags, our only recourse was to file a complaint.”

recourse is a remedy.

Remember it

re-COURSE → the COURSE left to run

One way has failed, and this is the course you can still run back to.

hooks ontocourse

Where it comes from

Latin recursus means a running back, from recurrere — re, back, plus currere, to run.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *ḱers-

  2. Latin

    recursus

  3. Old French

    recours

  4. Middle English

    recours

  5. English, today

    recourse

From Middle English recours and recoursen, from Old French recours, from Latin recursus, past participle of recurrō.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

recourse in the wild

  • In short, many jurisdictions hold that the loans obtained at the acquisition of a property ("purchase-money") are non-recourse, and most, if not all, subsequent loans are recourse.

    Deficiency judgment

  • A legal recourse is an action that can be taken by an individual or a corporation to attempt to remedy a legal difficulty.

    Legal recourse

  • Headed by a Brahmo cyberlaw expert and after taking due legal recourse outside India, many websites were recovered to Brahmoism that year.

    World Brahmo Council

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.