adj ·Uncommon ·Advanced level

Definitions

Adjective

1. 1
   drawing upon itself, referring back.

   "The recursive nature of stories which borrow from each other"

2. 2
   of an expression, each term of which is determined by applying a formula to preceding terms not-comparable
3. 3
   of a program or function that calls itself not-comparable
4. 4
   which can be computed by a theoretical model of a computer, in a finite amount of time not-comparable
5. 5
   whose characteristic function is recursive (4) not-comparable

Adjective

1. 1
   of or relating to a recursion wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms

computablealgorithmicdecidabledecidable

Antonyms

All antonyms

non recursivenon-recursive

Example

More examples

"Murphy's Law is recursive. Washing your car to make it rain doesn't work."

Etymology

Learned borrowing from New Latin recursīvus. Equivalent to recurse + -ive.

Related phrases

co-recursivefiltered-popping recursive transition networkleft-recursiverecursive acronymrecursive compound wordrecursive conundrumrecursive definitionrecursive descentrecursive functionrecursive neural network

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.