Other forms: meditating, meditated, meditates
To meditate is to still the mind deliberately. Sitting quietly, following the breath, letting thoughts go past.
The practice is ancient and the word now belongs as much to apps and clinics as to monasteries. There is an older sense with no sitting still in it at all, because to meditate on something is to turn it over at length, and writers use it that way constantly. It takes on. The noun meditation covers both, and a meditation can also be a piece of writing that thinks slowly out loud.
Meditate and remedy are near neighbours. Latin meditor, to reflect upon, is formed as though it were the frequentative of medeor, to heal, so thinking a thing over and treating it share a shape.
Proto-Indo-European
*med-
Latin
meditātus
English, today
meditate
Built from
1560; Latin meditātus, perfect active participle of meditor (“to think or reflect upon, consider, design, purpose, intend”) (see -ate and -ate), morphologically as if frequentative of medeor (“to heal, to cure, to remedy”); in sense and in form near to Ancient Greek μελετάω (“to care for, attend to, study, practise, etc.”). Participial usage up until Early Modern English.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Man Called Ove, Thinking & Memory
First appears in chapter 38 of A Man Called Ove.
Practise this word