Other forms: reminiscing, reminisces, reminisced
To reminisce is to talk warmly about things you remember from long ago. Old friends reminiscing, reminiscing about school, an evening of reminiscing.
The warmth is built into the word: reminiscing is always fond, which is what separates it from simply remembering. It takes about: reminisce about the old days. It is intransitive — you cannot reminisce something. The noun is reminiscence, and reminiscences in the plural means a written memoir. Note reminiscent of, which is a separate and much commoner phrase meaning similar to and bringing something to mind: a smell reminiscent of school dinners.
1verbreminisceTo talk fondly about things remembered from the past.
“They reminisced about the old shop for an hour.”
synonyms: recollect, look back
reminisce is a way of remembering aloud.
Latin reminisci meant to remember — re- plus a root related to mens, the mind, the same root as mental and mention. The word is the mind going back over itself, which is a good description of what an evening of reminiscing actually is.
Proto-Indo-European
*men-
Latin
reminīscēns
English, today
reminisce
Built from
a back-formation from reminiscence, from Latin reminīscēns, present participle of reminiscor (“to remember”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA