rumination.

1. Sustained or recurrent thinking about a subject, sometimes in a repetitive unproductive loop.

2. The process of bringing partly digested food back to the mouth and chewing it again, as ruminant animals do.

Use it for

Words that belong together

• anxious rumination
• prolonged rumination

On the page

Rumination kept returning him to the same unanswered question.

Her late-night rumination yielded no new understanding.

Usage notes

Primary category: horror. Forms: Usually uncountable; plural ruminations for individual reflections. Legacy lexical fields mirror sense 1 only. Use numbered sense fields for all meanings.