reconstruct
Americanverb (used with object)
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reconstructs,
present (3rd person singular)
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reconstructed,
past participle, past
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reconstructing
present participle
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to construct again; rebuild; make over.
The church was burned in 1895, but reconstructed in 1897.
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to re-create in the mind from given or available information.
The first step in solving this crime was to reconstruct the events of the murder.
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to cause to abandon earlier positions, beliefs, etc.; cause to adjust to new or current situations.
He's a reconstructed man with progressive views on gender equality.
The protesters and resisters refuse to be reconstructed.
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Historical Linguistics. to arrive at (hypothetical earlier forms of words, phonemic systems, etc.) by comparison of data from a later language or group of related languages.
verb
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to construct or form again; rebuild
to reconstruct a Greek vase from fragments
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to form a picture of (a crime, past event, etc) by piecing together evidence or acting out a version of what might have taken place
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
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reconstructernoun
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reconstructionnoun
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reconstructornoun
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reconstructibleadjective
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reconstructiveadjective
Inflected Forms
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
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reconstructsimple
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reconstructssimple
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have reconstructedperfect
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has reconstructedperfect
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am reconstructingprogressive
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are reconstructingprogressive
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is reconstructingprogressive
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have been reconstructingperfect progressive
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has been reconstructingperfect progressive
Past
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reconstructedsimple
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had reconstructedperfect
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was reconstructingprogressive
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were reconstructingprogressive
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had been reconstructingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of reconstruct
Explanation
If the verb to "construct" means to build something, then to reconstruct means to build it again. You can reconstruct a building, a city, or even an idea. If a house is destroyed in a fire, earthquake, or flood, you might try to reconstruct it — or you could build a totally new one. Either way, though, you could still be said to be reconstructing your home. Some buildings were destroyed so long ago that we don't know what they really looked like. The same can be said for whole cities and cultures. Still, archeologists try to reconstruct how those cities and cultures appeared at the time that they were flourishing. Linguists reconstruct long-dead languages. Detectives try to reconstruct crimes in order to figure out who committed them.
Vocabulary lists containing reconstruct
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Previously, plastic surgery had attempted to reconstruct "some semblance of an ear" using skin and tissue taken from other parts of his body, but the results could not replicate the shape of a natural ear.
From BBC ● Oct. 13, 2026
For this editorial, stylist RonBen worked with artist Braden Young to reconstruct some of the world’s infamous missing jewels and staged them on-model with just-stolen intensity.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 13, 2026
Researchers must effectively capture a snapshot of that fleeting moment and use the resulting particle patterns to reconstruct the properties of the quark-gluon plasma.
From Science Daily ● Oct. 6, 2026
From the rise and fall of the signal’s pitch as the satellite passed overhead, the scientists could reconstruct the entire orbit from a listening post.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 4, 2026
“I’ll bet you’ve got a lot of theories. Come on, reconstruct the crime. There we were at the tree. Then what happened, Sherlock Holmes?”
From "A Separate Peace" by John Knowles
The life Mr. Meyer reconstructs reads as a sustained revolt against the power of categories to diminish.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 7, 2026
The findings come from a study published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, which reconstructs the ancient marine ecosystem preserved in Colombia’s Paja Formation.
From Science Daily ● Dec. 19, 2025
In three-and-a-half hours and for less than $10 million, Corbet reconstructs post-war America from the ground up, proving his sweeping artistic vision to be just as impressive as László Tóth’s.
From Salon ● Feb. 28, 2025
Besides Sabri, actors play Ghofrane and Rahma, the daughters who left, as Ben Hania reconstructs the family’s past in search for clues for their radicalization.
From Seattle Times ● Feb. 23, 2024
Literature reconstructs life, and penetrates even to the very life- blood of humanity, from generation to generation.
From Sanine by Percy Pinkerton
"Experiments with reconstructed wooden spears produce very similar round holes in bone."
From BBC ● Oct. 15, 2026
The last time audiences saw Vision, the reconstructed synthezoid was flying off into the distance, and we didn’t know when we’d actually see him again.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 14, 2026
The Nobel committee said the prize was awarded for “demonstrating how economic models could be reconstructed to revitalise stabilisation policy.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 12, 2026
He accepted AI was used "to distinguish and visualize features in the reconstructed grayscale images".
From BBC ● Sep. 30, 2026
It was smaller than I had expected—as places reconstructed from borrowed memories inevitably are—but also duller and dustier.
From "The Gene" by Siddhartha Mukherjee
That makes reconstructing the detector and designing carefully tailored adversarial changes that can evade it considerably more difficult.
From Science Daily ● Oct. 1, 2026
Ms. Margolles purchased a home in the middle of this and demolished it, here reconstructing the rubble into a rectangular minimalist monument that stretches across a large gallery.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 30, 2026
After making those corrections, the team developed a new method for reconstructing the glacier's internal ice in three dimensions using Bayesian statistics.
From Science Daily ● Aug. 28, 2026
When something goes wrong, however, reconstructing that journey can begin to feel like a real investigation.
From Salon ● Aug. 27, 2026
He still entertained a pair of opinions—or, to use his word, “concepts”—and, in reconstructing the crime, had developed both a “single-killer concept” and a “double-killer concept.”
From "In Cold Blood" by Truman Capote
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Get a wordDefinitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
