retrieval

American  

[ri-tree-vuhl] / rɪˈtri vəl /

noun

retrievals plural

1. the act of retrieving.

2. the chance of recovery or restoration.

   Sadly, many aboriginal languages have been lost beyond retrieval.

3. Psychology. the act or process of accessing information previously encoded and stored in memory.

   The article explores the use of picture matching tasks to assist in word retrieval in aphasic patients.

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retrieval British  

/ rɪˈtriːvəl /

noun

1. the act or process of retrieving

2. the possibility of recovery, restoration, or rectification (esp in the phrase beyond retrieval )

3. a computer filing operation that recalls records or other data from a file

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Other Word Forms

Noun Inflected Forms

• retrievals
  plural

Etymology

Origin of retrieval

First recorded in 1635–45; retrieve + -al ²

Explanation

The act of bringing something back is called retrieval. When you throw a tennis ball to Fido and he brings it back to you, that's retrieval. When you lose something and get it back, that's retrieval, whether it's a tote bag you accidentally left at the library or a file you can't find on your computer. In fact, the word retrieval is a common one in computer science, meaning "the act of accessing information." The word comes from the verb retrieve, which was first used in the fifteenth century to describe a hunting dog bringing a dead bird back from a field.

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

retrieval retrievals

Using imprint and retrieval protocols based on the QMM equations, we recovered the original quantum states with over 90% accuracy.

From Science Daily ● Jun. 18, 2026

Approaches such as retrieval augmented generation, or RAG, can tap relevant organizational data, but can’t reason about the way that data connects, according to Graphon.

From The Wall Street Journal ● May 14, 2026

Women going through egg retrieval “deserve the same grace we’d extend to anyone recovering from surgery,” says Lauren Makler, the CEO and founder of the fertility-education platform Cofertility.

From MarketWatch ● May 11, 2026

Marvell’s chips and accelerators should be even more valuable in a world driven by agentic AI, seeing as the technology requires continuous loops of reasoning, tool use, memory retrieval, and task coordination.

From Barron's ● Mar. 30, 2026

Perhaps, however, we are linked in circuits for the storage, processing, and retrieval of information, since this appears to be the most basic and universal of all human enterprises.

From "The Lives of a Cell" by Lewis Thomas

From what I know about egg retrievals, it seems entirely plausible that this will be the case for you.

From MarketWatch ● May 11, 2026

Giordano spent his son’s college graduation glued to his phone, coordinating the first wave of retrievals.

From The Wall Street Journal ● May 11, 2026

"To determine the abundances of molecules in Wolf 1130C, I used a modeling technique known as atmospheric retrievals," said Gonzales.

From Science Daily ● Nov. 9, 2025

She and her partner struggled to conceive and ended up going through a couple of rounds of egg retrievals in the in-vitro fertilization process.

From Salon ● May 10, 2025

After years of miscarriages and egg retrievals, I did not have a baby.

From Slate ● Feb. 27, 2024