Other forms: recovered, recovering, recovers
To recover is to get your health back after being ill. Recover from flu, she is recovering well, fully recovered.
The preposition is from. It also means to get back something lost or stolen: recover the money, the paintings were recovered. And it means to regain composure: he recovered quickly and carried on. Note recovery, the noun; recoverable; and that in American English recover is used where British English says get better, which is why medical notes and everyday speech sound so different about the same thing.
1verbrecoverTo get your health back after being ill.
“After a week in bed, he recovered from the flu and went back to work.”
2verblostTo get back something lost or stolen.
“They recovered the paintings from a garage in Antwerp.”
recover is a getting back.
Latin recuperare means to get back, and Old French split it into two forms — recover and recuperate. English kept both, so one word does the finding and the other the healing, from a single Latin verb.
Proto-Indo-European
*keh₂p-
Latin
recupero
Old French
recovrer
Anglo-Norman
recoverer
Middle English
recoveren
English, today
recover
From Middle English recoveren, rekeveren, from Anglo-Norman recoverer and Old French recovrer, from Latin recupero, alternative form of recipero. a doublet of recuperate. The noun is from Middle English recover, from the verb.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA