Other forms: ruminating, ruminates, ruminated
To ruminate is to turn an unhappy thought over and over. Ruminate on the past, ruminating for hours, stop ruminating.
Psychology uses it precisely, and the finding is unwelcome: rumination feels like problem-solving and works like the opposite, keeping low mood going rather than resolving it. The image is a cow chewing the cud, which is what the Latin rumen names.
1verbruminateTo turn a thought over and over.
“She lay awake ruminating on what her boss had said about her work.”
ruminate is a way of thinking.
Latin ruminari means to chew the cud, from rumen, the first stomach of a cow.
Latin
rūminātus
English, today
ruminate
Built from
1533; Latin rūminātus, perfect active participle of rūminor (“to chew the cud, turn over in the mind”) (see -ate), from rūmen + -ō, itself of uncertain origin.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA