Other forms: comprehending, comprehended, comprehends
To comprehend something is to take its meaning in completely. It is the weightier cousin of understand, kept for things that are large, strange or hard: 'I could not comprehend what she was telling me.'
Comprehend spends most of its life in the negative — cannot comprehend, hard to comprehend, beyond comprehension — because people reach for it when a mind is failing to close around something. In ordinary talk, understand does the work; comprehend in a conversation about lunch sounds stiff and starched. The noun comprehension turns up at school in reading comprehension, where you answer questions on a passage. There is a second, formal sense meaning to include or contain: a term that comprehends several ideas holds all of them inside it. And keep comprehensive out of it — that means covering everything, not understanding anything.
1verbcomprehendTo take in the full meaning of something.
“I still cannot comprehend how the fire spread that fast.”
synonyms: grasp, understand
2verbincludeTo include or contain.
“The term comprehends every kind of written agreement.”
Comprehend arrived through Middle English comprehenden from Latin comprehendere, 'to grasp', which is com- plus prehendere, 'to seize'. The Latin picture is a hand closing on an object, and English kept the same picture in its own words: you grasp an idea, you get hold of an argument, you catch someone's meaning.
Proto-Indo-European
*gʰed-
Latin
comprehendere — to grasp
Middle English
comprehenden
English, today
comprehend
Built from
From Middle English comprehenden, from Latin comprehendere (“to grasp”), from the prefix com- + prehendere (“to seize”). a doublet of comprend.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA