Other forms: regurgitated, regurgitating, regurgitates
To regurgitate is to bring food back up before it has been digested. A bird feeding its chicks does it on purpose.
The literal sense belongs to biology rather than to illness — regurgitating is not quite vomiting, since it is gentler and the food has not gone far. A cow regurgitates grass to chew again; a seabird regurgitates fish into an open beak. The figurative sense is where you are likeliest to meet the word, and it is an insult: to regurgitate facts is to repeat them in an exam without having understood a single one. That use is common in complaints about teaching.
1verbregurgitateTo bring swallowed food back up into the mouth.
“The parent bird regurgitates food for the chicks.”
2verbrepeatTo repeat information without understanding it.
“The essay simply regurgitates the lecture notes.”
Regurgitate is a whirlpool run backwards. Latin gurges meant a whirlpool or a gulf and gurgitō to engulf, so what went down comes back up the same way it went.
Proto-Indo-European
*gʷerh₃-
Latin
regurgitātus
English, today
regurgitate
Built from
From Latin regurgitātus, past participle of regurgitō, combined form of re- (“back”) + gurgitō (“to engulf, flood”), from gurges (“whirlpool, gulf, sea, abyss”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA