Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • intransitive verb To form an idea of; imagine or conceive.
  • intransitive verb To conceive mental images; think.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • . To form in idea or thought; fancy.
  • To apprehend mentally so as to retain and be able to recall; fix permanently in the mind.
  • To form ideas; think.
  • In metaphysics, produced by an idea, specifically by a Platonic idea; existing by virtue of its participation in an idea.
  • noun In metaphysics, the correlative or object of an idea; the real or actual existence correlating with an idea.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • transitive verb rare To form in idea; to fancy.
  • transitive verb rare To apprehend in thought so as to fix and hold in the mind; to memorize.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • verb To apprehend in thought so as to fix and hold in the mind; to memorize.
  • verb To generate an idea.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • verb form a mental image of something that is not present or that is not the case

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From idea +‎ -ate

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Examples

Comments

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  • Webster 1913:

    To form in idea; to fancy.

    To apprehend in thought so as to fix and hold in the mind; to memorize.

    July 7, 2007

  • Honestly, until I looked it up I thought this was a horrible made-up marketing term.

    April 7, 2009

  • @ecbrenner me too

    February 17, 2011