Recipe
noun ·3 syllables ·Uncommon ·College level
Definitions
- 1 A formula for preparing or using a medicine; a prescription; also, a medicine prepared from such instructions. archaic
"As the world's drug habit shows, governments are failing in their quest to monitor every London window-box and Andean hillside for banned plants. But even that Sisyphean task looks easy next to the fight against synthetic drugs. No sooner has a drug been blacklisted than chemists adjust their recipe and start churning out a subtly different one."
- 2 directions for making something wordnet
- 3 Any set of instructions for preparing a mixture of ingredients.
"[Isaac Newton] was obsessed with alchemy. He spent hours copying alchemical recipes and trying to replicate them in his laboratory. He believed that the Bible contained numerological codes. The truth is that Newton was very much a product of his time."
- 4 A plan or procedure to obtain a given end result; a prescription. broadly
"His new approach is definitely a recipe for success."
- 5 Now especially, a set of instructions for making or preparing food dishes.
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- 6 A set of conditions and parameters of an industrial process to obtain a given result.
"Stepper recipes."
Example
More examples"It's my special recipe, rabbit stew."
Etymology
Borrowed from Middle French récipé, from Latin recipe, second person singular imperative of Latin recipiō (“receive”). Doublet of recept and receipt.
Related phrases
More for "recipe"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.