recipe

Borrowed from Middle French récipé, from Latin recipiō (“receive”). Compare receipt.

• (UK, US) IPA^(key): /ˈɹɛs.ɪ.pi/, /ˈɹɛs.ə.pi/

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recipe (plural recipes)

1. (medicine, archaic) A formula for preparing or using a medicine; a prescription; also, a medicine prepared from such instructions. [from 16th c.]
   • 2013 August 10, “A new prescription”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8848:

     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. Any set of instructions for preparing a mixture of ingredients. [from 17th c.]
   • 2014 June 21, “Magician’s brain”, in The Economist, volume 411, number 8892:

     [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.

3. By extension, a plan or procedure to obtain a given end result; a prescription. [from 17th c.]

   His new approach is definitely a recipe for success.

4. Now especially, a set of instructions for making or preparing food dishes. [from 18th c.]
5. A set of conditions and parameters of an industrial process to obtain a given result.

   Stepper recipes.

• Peirce, Pierce, piecer, pierce

• IPA^(key): /reˈtsi.pe/

recipe

1. present of reciper
2. imperative of reciper

recipe

1. second-person singular present active imperative of recipiō

• recipe in Charles du Fresne du Cange’s Glossarium Mediæ et Infimæ Latinitatis (augmented edition, 1883–1887)