Rejoining

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. The activity of joining or uniting again after having been separated
2. The act of coming together once more after being apart
3. Uniting again following a period of separation or disconnection

Etymology: The verb "rejoin" has a double life in English. In its older sense, to rejoin meant to answer back, especially in a lawyerly way: a defendant's reply to a plaintiff in medieval pleading was a rejoinder, and the act of making it was to rejoin. That sense came into English through Middle French, where "rejoindre" was built from "re-", meaning "again", and "joindre", "to join". The English verb thus literally means "to join again", and the answering sense grew out of that idea of setting one thing back against another. The "coming together again" sense is the more transparent one. English already had "join" from the same Old French root, and "re-" simply adds the sense of repetition, so rejoining is the act of rejoining what was separated. "Rejoinder" and "rejoin" are doublets: two words descended from the same source that entered English by different routes and took on different shapes and senses.

Synonyms: returning, reuniting, joining again, resuming, reconnecting

Antonyms: departing, leaving, separating, disjoining, breaking