Often merely intensive, and in many of the older borrowings from French and Latin the precise sense of re- is forgotten, lost in secondary senses, or weakened beyond recognition, so that it has no apparent semantic content ( receive, recommend, recover, reduce, recreate, refer, religion, remain, request, require). OED writes that it is "impossible to attempt a complete record of all the forms resulting from its use," and adds that "The number of these is practically infinite. The many meanings in the notion of "back" give re- its broad sense-range: "a turning back opposition restoration to a former state "transition to an opposite state." From the extended senses in "again," re- becomes "repetition of an action," and in this sense it is extremely common as a formative element in English, applicable to any verb. In some English words from French and Italian re- appears as ra- and the following consonant is often doubled (see rally (v.1)). In earliest Latin the prefix became red- before vowels and h-, a form preserved in redact, redeem, redolent, redundant, redintegrate, and, in disguise, render (v.). Watkins (2000) describes this as a "Latin combining form conceivably from Indo-European *wret-, metathetical variant of *wert- "to turn." De Vaan says the "only acceptable etymology" for it is a 2004 explanation which reconstructs a root in PIE *ure "back." 1200, from Old French re- and directly from Latin re- an inseparable prefix meaning "again back anew, against." Word-forming element meaning "back, back from, back to the original place " also "again, anew, once more," also conveying the notion of "undoing" or "backward," etc.
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