brooding

UK/ˈbɹuːdɪŋ/US/ˈbɹuːdɪŋ/

adjectiveC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #8,414 of 15,258neutral

Brooding means heavy with dark unspoken thought. A brooding silence, a brooding presence, brooding over it.

It is thought turned inward and going nowhere, which is what separates brooding from thinking. Of a landscape or a building it means heavy and vaguely threatening. The image is a bird sitting on eggs — brooding is sitting on something and not letting it go. Note brood, both the verb and the young birds.

Definitions of brooding

1adjectivebroodingHeavy with dark unspoken thought.C1
“He sat in brooding silence all evening, staring at the fire.”
synonyms: moody, sombre

brooding is a quality of dark thought.

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

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brooding in the wild

Egg incubation is done under favorable environmental conditions, possibly by brooding and hatching the egg.
Egg incubation
Darwin's frog has an unusual method of brooding, in which the male will facilitate development of its tadpoles inside its vocal sac.
Darwin's frog
The genus consists of only two species, the southern and northern gastric-brooding frogs, both of which became extinct in the mid-1980s.
Gastric-brooding frog
The southern gastric brooding frog was last seen in 1983 and was declared extinct in 2006.
Gastric-brooding frog
The brooding anemone, Halianthella annularis, is a species of sea anemone in the family Halcampidae.
Brooding anemone

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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