resuspend

Imagine you have a bottle of natural orange juice where all the pulp has settled at the bottom. To get that pulp moving through the liquid again, you give it a shake. In that sense, you resuspend the particles. In science, resuspend usually means to mix settled solids back into a liquid so they are spread through it again. In a more general sense, it can also mean to suspend something again after it had already been restored. If a student was suspended from school, allowed back, and then got into trouble again, the principal might resuspend them. It is the act of putting something back into suspension or back on hold.

To resuspend means to place something back into a state of suspension. This word is most often used in laboratory settings. When a solid substance settles out of a liquid and forms sediment, a scientist may resuspend the particles by shaking, stirring, or pipetting until they are spread through the liquid again. It describes moving something from a settled state back into a dispersed or floating state within a fluid.

Outside the lab, the word keeps its literal parts: re- means "again," and suspend means "to stop for a time" or sometimes "to hang." So resuspend can also mean to suspend something again after it had been allowed to continue or be used. For example, if a judge temporarily halts a trial, allows it to continue, but then faces a new legal problem, the court might resuspend the proceedings. In the same way, if a driver's license was reinstated but the driver commits another offense, the authorities may resuspend the license. The word is sometimes confused with resume, but they mean different things: resume means to start again, while resuspend means to put on hold again or, in science, to mix settled material back into a liquid.