Other forms: mulled, mulling, mulls
To mull is to turn something over slowly in your mind. Mull it over, mulling the offer, mull the question.
It nearly always takes over and it always implies time — mulling is deliberately unhurried, which is what distinguishes it from considering. Quite separately, to mull wine is to heat it with spices, and mulled wine is a fixed winter phrase. Note that the thinking sense probably comes from an old word for dust and grinding.
1verbmullTo turn something over slowly in your mind.
“She mulled over the job offer for a week before she said yes.”
2verbheatTo heat wine with spices.
“At Christmas, we mull red wine with cinnamon, cloves and orange peel.”
mull is a slow considering.
Probably from Middle English mull, dust or crumbs, through a sense of grinding over. The wine sense is a separate and obscure word.
Proto-Indo-European
*melh₂-
Latin
mollis — soft
Middle French
mol
Proto-West Germanic
*muli
Old English
myl — dust, mould
Middle English
molle
English, today
mull
Built from
Middle English molle, mulle (“dust, rubbish”), possibly from Old English myl (“dust, mould”), from Proto-West Germanic muli, a deverbal formation from mulljan and thus cognate with Dutch mul (“dust, mould”), German Müll (“rubbish”), Swedish moln (“cloud”) and related to mill (“to grind”). Alternatively, from Middle French mol or its etymon Latin mollis (“soft”). Some verbal senses are supplied by Middle English mollen (“to soften, dissolve”), from Old French moillier, from Latin molliāre (“to steep”), itself from mollis; compare moil.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA