# retro-engineer
## English
### Etymology

From retro- +‎ engineer.

### Verb

retro-engineer (third-person singular simple present retro-engineers, present participle retro-engineering, simple past and past participle retro-engineered)
* (transitive) To reverse-engineer; to analyze (an existing item) in order to determine how to replicate it.
** 2006, David O. Faulkner, Andrew Campbell, The Oxford Handbook of Strategy, →ISBN:On other occasions, where the technical basis for the initial entry cannot be defended, the second mover has the advantage, since it may well be less costly to retro-engineer a product than to have invented and innovated it.
** 2010, Greg Castle, Remote Viewer: NSA Secret Agent, →ISBN, page 99:I suspected that's why I could so easily retro-engineer and re-invent their ultra-superior and advanced technology.
** 2010, Mike W. Barr, Majician, →ISBN, page 39:He was an engineer, it was his responsibility to retro-engineer the saucer and its components, to find out how it could do what it had done.
** 2010, Jonathan Maberry, The Dragon Factory, →ISBN:You can retro-engineer it. You look at a roomful of junk and you pay attention to what's lying on what, because that will eventually tell you what fell first.
** 2011, Kenneth Royce Moore, Plato, Politics and a Practical Utopia, →ISBN:It may have been the case that Plato and the Academy were attempting to retro-engineer an ideal government based on existing models of past experiments in political reform.
** 2012, Darrell Schweitzer, George R.R. Martin, James Morrow, Speaking of the Fantastic III: Interviews with Science Fiction Writers, →ISBN:If you can retro-engineer Sauron's ring, it isn't as magical anymore. It's a matter of the characters getting control of the material, as opposed to being in a situation or universe where this is not really possible.
* (transitive) To develop (a process) by starting with the goal and working backwards to determine the steps needed to achieve it.
** 2002, J. Leslie McKeown, Retaining Top Employees, →ISBN, page 175:Use the functional interaction with your best performers to retro-engineer a mission, values, and culture check-in.
** 2009, Peter Hinssen, Jeroen Derynck, Business/IT Fusion, →ISBN:Set out the ambitions within a realistic time-frame, and re-engineer what you need to achieve in order to get there, taking into account possible interdependencies between different communication elements. This is altogether not very different from any IT project: define your goals, break it into smaller pieces, work out the interdependencies, and retro-engineer the goals into how you're going to get there.
** 2013, Joshua Halberstam, Debra Gonsher, The Community College Guide, →ISBN:As we noted in the previous chapter, the best method for scheduling your time is to retro-engineer—that is, work backward.
* (transitive) To revise or adapt (an existing item or process) in order to achieve a new purpose.
** 2009, Graham Haughton, Philip Allmendinger, David Counsell, The New Spatial Planning, →ISBN:All of this makes some sense in terms of using the windfall brownfield site to retro-engineer a more mixed use form of development, but it does show up the shortcomings of the previous approach and the difficulties of achieving the new constraint policy.
** 2014, John Oberdiek, Philosophical Foundations of the Law of Torts, →ISBN, page 394:And yet, when a teenager with known suicidal tendencies overdoses on easily available pills, many will feel fully entitled to demand recompense from the homeowner whose inadvertence so predictably in-fact and proximately contributed to the tragedy, and any effort to retro-engineer a precautionary rule is just disingenuous Monday morning quarterbacking.
** 2015, Frances Cleary, Massimo Felici, Cyber Security and Privacy, →ISBN:It is much more difficult to retro-engineer at the end, security is all about how it is used and should be a driving force from concept commencement.
** 2016, S. Poor, J. Schulman, Women and the Medieval Epic, →ISBN:Once Alexander is on the scene he must defend his mother's status continually in order to retro-engineer his own legitimacy.