recursive

drawing upon itself, referring back.

Adjective

  1. drawing upon itself, referring back.
    • The recursive nature of stories which borrow from each other
  2. of an expression, each term of which is determined by applying a formula to preceding terms
  3. of a program or function that calls itself
  4. which can be computed by a theoretical model of a computer, in a finite amount of time
  5. whose characteristic function is recursive (4)

Origin

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

Forms

more recursive most recursive

Antonyms

non-recursive

Hypernyms

recursively enumerable

Hyponyms

primitive recursive tail recursive

Derived

co-recursive filtered-popping recursive transition network left-recursive nonrecursive recursion recursive acronym recursive compound word recursive conundrum recursive definition recursive descent recursive function recursively recursiveness recursive neural network recursivity subrecursive superrecursive transrecursive