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"We had it (=Turkey red calico), but we're out of it now. You'll get that from an upholsterer, someone who recovers furniture.” (VOA Learning English)

‘Recovers’ would be mean “to cover again or anew,” I should suppose. If it’s right, why isn’t there hyphen as the dictionary? Is it a typo or are both used to denote the meaning?

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The sense is certainly re-cover, and it would be a courtesy to the reader to write it with the hyphen to avoid ambiguity.

But such courtesies are often omitted. This piece has been extensively rewritten and simplified for the VoA. If you look at the original here you will find that the word recover (or re-cover) does not even appear; it has been inserted to explain the word upholsterer, which is unlikely to be familiar to most learners. The potential ambiguity probably never crossed the re-writer's mind.

Note, by the way, that there is no ambiguity in speech: re-cover is pronounced with stressed /ri/, as you may hear at 4:38 in the audio version at your link, while recover is pronounced with unstressed /rə/.

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  • Thank you for checking the audio. It is as you say. For I read the script to quit listening to, if you haven’t referred to the pronunciation, I shouldn’t have listened to the calico again - boring it was.
    – Listenever
    Commented Oct 5, 2014 at 13:30
  • @Listenever Yes, it's a pretty awful reading. They're so careful to be intelligible that all the humour is lost.
    – StoneyB on hiatus
    Commented Oct 5, 2014 at 14:05

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