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recension

/rɪˈsɛnʃən/
IPA guide

Other forms: recensions

When a literary or scholarly work is revised, it's called a recension. A recent recension of a medieval text is meant to be its most accurate, updated version.

The term recension often refers to the process of editing and reworking very old works in translation, like the Bible or ancient Greek writing. These texts have gone through multiple recensions over time, each one trying to capture an accurate interpretation of the original words for a new audience of readers. Recension, originally "a review or examination," has a Latin root meaning "to count, enumerate, or survey."

Definitions of recension
  1. noun
    an act of revising a text to incorporate updated information
  2. noun
    text that has been revised to include updated information
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