It's the word of the day for February 11th.

Today's word is ruminate, spelled R-U-M-I-N-A-T-E. Ruminate is a verb. To ruminate is to think carefully and deeply about something.

Here's the word used in a sentence from pitchfork by Dash Lewis.

Most of the songs bear the name of a store you'd see in every mall in the United States

before they became sad ghost towns, air conditioning and smooth jazz blasting in the emptied

echoing caverns of capitalism.

The trio uses nostalgia as a tool of examination, ruminating on the not-too-distant past

in order to process the funny and sometimes heartbreaking process of getting older together.

When you ruminate, you chew something over, either literally or figuratively.

Literal rumination may seem a little gross to humans, but to cows chewing your cud,

partially digested food brought up from the stomach for another chew, is just a natural part of

life. Figurative ruminating is much more palatable to humans.

That kind of deep meditative thought is often deemed quite a worthy activity.

The verb ruminate has described metaphorical chewing over since the early 1500s,

an actual chewing since later that same century. Our English word comes from and shares the

meanings of the Latin verb ruminari, meaning to chew the cud or to muse upon, which in turn comes

from Rumen, the Latin name for the first stomach compartment of ruminant animals, that is creatures like cows that chew their cud.

With your word of the day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.

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