reconstruct

present singular third person reconstructs · participle present reconstructing · participle past reconstructed · past reconstructed

1. To construct again; to restore.

   The greatest number of bridges requiring modification are overline bridges, and many methods are adopted in reconstructing and altering them to give increased clearances.

   1958 July 28, “Bridge Reconstruction for L.M.R. Electrification”, in Railway Magazine, page 465

   2 more examples

   As it was necessary to reconstruct the culvert close to the original position, the hazards of tunnelling through clay in an unstable condition, due to the absorption of water, had to be reduced by the application of electro-osmosis to dry out the material.

   1950 October, “Completion of Flood-Damage Repairs, East Coast Main Line”, in Railway Magazine, page 709

   […] after the original Victorian station was demolished and then entombed in concrete in the 1960s, Birmingham New Street became a byword for the worst excesses of the much-loathed Brutalist architecture so widely used to reconstruct inner-city post-war Britain.

   2020 July 29, Paul Stephen, “A new collaboration centred on New Street”, in Rail, page 54

   Antonyms: deconstruct

2. To attempt to understand an event by recreating, imagining, or talking through the circumstances.

   But reconstructing the scene among those silent walls in the precarious light, with the unforgotten ghosts of other crimes ready to emerge from every shadow, I can conceive that no more frightful spectre than this sombre being, dripping red from hands and face at every step, has ever walked.

   1927, Ernest Bramah [pseudonym; Ernest Brammah Smith], Max Carrados Mysteries