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In Czech, the word rešerše, i.e. the localized version of the French recherché, has two meanings:

  1. the act of looking up information on a topic
  2. a summary of the found information

Thus if one asked for a rešerše, he/she would expect to get a summary on the topic in question.

Now, I was just editing someone's English CV and found the word used frequently there, the person claims it is commonly used in English, too. Is that true?

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  • When I lived in Calgary, Alberta, in 1970–1972, sportscasters covering Calgary Stampeders football games in the CFL would use the term résumé to describe what a U.S. announcer would have called a recap, which is essentially a summary of the scoring and other highlights of the game. But I've never heard anyone in anglophone Canada or the United States use recherché to refer to a summary.
    – Sven Yargs
    Commented Nov 13, 2015 at 7:33
  • No, that is not a common word in English. The corresponding word in English is "research" or possibly "results". One doesn't ask for a recherché in English.
    – anongoodnurse
    Commented Nov 13, 2015 at 7:34
  • I think you mean research: The systematic investigation into and study of materials and sources in order to establish facts and reach new conclusions. oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/research
    – user66974
    Commented Nov 13, 2015 at 7:36
  • 1
    "Precis" is the French loan word that means summary.
    – user662852
    Commented Nov 13, 2015 at 11:27
  • The French variant for summary is "résumé", not recherché.
    – rogermue
    Commented Nov 13, 2015 at 12:04

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The word recherché means in French carefully searched for or researched. In English, we know this from Proust's work À la recherche du temps perdu, which was mistranslated Remembrance of Things Past and has been corrected to Search for Time Lost. English has adopted the word to mean little known or unusual or unfamiliar, i.e, something that would take a careful search to find out.

From Reason, Truth, and Self by Michael Luntley:

We can predict the course of disease, the growth of crops. We can even predict such recherché events as the bending of light by objects with large gravitational fields and still get it all right.

Not a commonly-used word and not a substitute for summary.

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  • I wouldn't call changing an untranslateable title of a book a mistranslation. Search for Time Lost is also a mistranslation, in that temps perdu is a French idiom that means wasted time (so there's a double meaning in the title: wasted time/lost time), and time lost does not have a double meaning in English.
    – Peter Shor
    Commented Nov 13, 2015 at 12:05

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