reverse engineer
verb
reverse engineered; reverse engineering; reverse engineers
: to disassemble and examine or analyze in detail (a product or device) to discover the concepts involved in manufacture usually in order to produce something similar
reverse engineering
noun
Examples of reverse engineer in a Sentence
They reverse engineered the software.
Recent Examples on the Web
With the benefit of hindsight, agencies would very likely reverse engineer a need for anonymity for police officers whose duties do not actually demand such secrecy.
—
Charles Ford Champion, Mercury News, 9 Sep. 2025
Vaikunthan Rajaratnam, a nerve surgeon and UNESCO chair partner, claimed in a LinkedIn article, however, he’s been working to reverse engineer ChatGPT to actually sound like him.
—Sydney Lake, Fortune, 9 Sep. 2025
The most compelling applications don’t try to reverse engineer what colleges want.
—Liz Doe Stone, Forbes.com, 14 Aug. 2025
That’s like asking a microelectronics engineer to reverse engineer the architecture, microcode, and operating system running on a state-of-the-art processor without the use of a digital logic probe, which would be a virtually impossible task.
—IEEE Spectrum, 28 May 2022
See All Example Sentences for reverse engineer
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Charles Ford Champion, Mercury News, 9 Sep. 2025
Vaikunthan Rajaratnam, a nerve surgeon and UNESCO chair partner, claimed in a LinkedIn article, however, he’s been working to reverse engineer ChatGPT to actually sound like him.
—Sydney Lake, Fortune, 9 Sep. 2025
The most compelling applications don’t try to reverse engineer what colleges want.
—Liz Doe Stone, Forbes.com, 14 Aug. 2025
That’s like asking a microelectronics engineer to reverse engineer the architecture, microcode, and operating system running on a state-of-the-art processor without the use of a digital logic probe, which would be a virtually impossible task.
—IEEE Spectrum, 28 May 2022
See All Example Sentences for reverse engineer
Cite this Entry
“Reverse engineer.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/reverse%20engineer. Accessed 30 Sep. 2025.
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