Recidivism

[Jesse Sheidlower]

On Thu, Mar 21, 2002 at 10:45:35AM -0500, John Blower wrote:
> I was recently in conversation with a social worker who mentioned that one
> of her clients was unlikely "to recidivate".
>
> I hadn't heard this before.
>
> Is this commonplace social work jargon?

Well, OED has an entry with citations back to the early sixteenth
century, and we seem to have examples from at least the 1940s in
the specific sense 'to relapse into crime'.

Jesse Sheidlower
OED