ruminate

verb

1. (intransitive)To chew cud. (Said of ruminants.) Involves regurgitating partially digested food from the rumen.

   “A camel will ruminate just as a cow will.”

   “There is surely some point beyond which the acquisition of other men’s thoughts must not be carried. This we say for the sake of those helluones librorum, who read forever and without stint; browsing as diligently as oxen in the green herbage of rich meads, but, unlike these, never lying down to ruminate. Life is too short, Art is too long, for a human mind to make perpetual accretion of book-learning, without halt. Sufflaminandum est.”

2. (intransitive)To meditate or reflect.

   “I didn't answer right away because I needed to ruminate first.”

   “In the present case, therefore, it now comes closer and closer, in thought, to the first finite; but before taking hold of it, and determining to explore it, the mind proposes, and ruminates, certain middle questions, touching the actual existence of a nexus, and the possibility there is, of discovering the nature, and quality of the nexus, which subsists between the cause, and the causate, or between the infinite, and the first finite.”

   “All its sweetness, its wild purity, its slow, sorrowful strength, and its sudden overtripping, overmastering joy , drifted out upon the sunshine of the meadow, the varied phrases coming turn and turn about with long intervening silences, as though the singer ruminated on all the beauty before her, and unconsciously sang her thoughts aloud.”

   “Meanwhile, the MoT had itself also been ruminating on options for the northern half of the route.”

3. (transitive)To meditate or ponder over; to muse on.

   “What I know / Is ruminated, plotted, and set down.”

   “Mad with desire, she ruminates her sin.”

   “"Good-by, my dear Belinda; I leave you to ruminate sweet and bitter thoughts; to think of the last speech and confession of Lady Delacour, or, what will interest you much more, the first speech and confession of—Clarence Harvey."”

adj

1. (not-comparable)Having a hard albumen penetrated by irregular channels filled with softer matter, as the nutmeg and the seeds of the North American papaw.

   “a ruminate endosperm”