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repair

UK/ɹɪˈpɛə/
verbB12 meaningsCommon in everyday speech and writing · #2,647 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: repairs, repaired, repairing

To repair something is to make a broken thing work again. A new part, a patch, or an hour with a screwdriver.

It is the most formal of the family, since mend suits clothes and shoes, fix suits everything and is the most casual of the three, and repair suits machines and buildings. As a noun it appears in useful phrases: in good repair, beyond repair, under repair. There is a separate and formal verb meaning to go somewhere, as in they repaired to the drawing room, which now sounds deliberately old-fashioned.

Krueger · CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Definitions of repair

  1. 1verbrepairTo restore something damaged to working order.B1

    “He repaired the fence before the winter.”

  2. 2nounactThe act or state of being restored.B1

    “The roof is badly in need of repair.”

Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.

Also accepted in games: fix, mend

Where it comes from

  1. Latin

    reparō — renew, repair

  2. Middle French

    reparer

  3. Middle English

    repairen

  4. English, today

    repair

Coined between 1300 and 1350 from Middle English repairen, from Middle French reparer, from Latin reparō (“renew, repair”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Everyday Verbs, A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 6 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

repair in the wild

  • Groin hernias that do not cause symptoms in males do not need immediate surgical repair, a practice referred to as "watchful waiting".

    Hernia

  • In living organisms, they are essential machinery for many aspects of DNA repair.

    Nuclease

  • Many genes that were initially shown to influence life span have turned out to be involved in DNA damage repair and protection.

    DNA repair

  • The 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich, and Aziz Sancar for their work on the molecular mechanisms of DNA repair processes.

    DNA repair

  • As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.

    Kintsugi

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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.

Related words

  • beyond repair