The term originalism is often used as shorthand for "original intent," which refers specifically to the belief in recapturing the intentions of the framers. But it can also encompass, as historian Jack Rakove points out, two related but distinct doctrines: original meaning, which seeks to recapture only what the actual words of the Constitution meant back in 1787, and original understanding, which looks not to what the framers intended but to what other Americans at the time, particularly those who ratified the Constitution, understood the framers' words to mean.