meditation

From Old French meditacion, from Latin meditatio, from meditatus, the past participle of meditārī (“to meditate, to think over, consider”), itself from Proto-Indo-European *med- (“to measure, limit, consider, advise”).

• IPA^(key): /mɛdɪˈteɪʃən/

• Audio (Southern England)

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• Audio (US)

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• Rhymes: -eɪʃən

meditation (countable and uncountable, plural meditations)

1. A devotional exercise of, or leading to, contemplation.

   (Can we add an example for this sense?)

2. Any of various types of achieving more or less altered states of consciousness, such as vacancy of mind or prolonged contemplation on a single sensation or thought, through relaxed or focused mental and physical activity generally of a nonstrenuous and non–substance-induced nature.

   Hyponym: transcendental meditation

   • 2007 [1995], Richard Rhodes, How to Write: Advice and Reflections, e-book edition, HarperCollins, pages 18-19:

     Free-associating on paper is valuable—letting loose, as I described in the last chapter, and writing whatever you feel like writing, any way you want. It’s valuable when you’re learning to write to help you deal with fear, and it continues to be a useful technique for starting a piece of writing or moving beyond a point where you’re stuck. It’s a good way to develop characters and story by drawing on unconscious associations, free-associating about something (a process that used to be called meditation before meditation came to mean emptying your mind). […] Writing to communicate is a different matter. Professional writers, without exception so far as I know, consider unstructured, unedited free association to be at best only the first stage of writing. Not even Jack Kerouac wrote that way, although he tried to make it look as if he did.

1. A contemplative discourse, often on a religious or philosophical subject.

   Her book is less a cookbook than a meditation on the craft of cookery.

2. A musical theme treated in a meditative manner.
3. Careful and thorough thought.

   Synonyms: see Thesaurus:consideration

   deep meditation

   in meditation

   He was lost in careful meditation on how best to proceed when a sudden phone call forced him to decide.

• meditate
• meditative
• meditationist
• meditativeness
• premeditation

• mentation

• tomatidine

From meditere (“to meditate”), from Latin meditārī (“to meditate, to think over, consider”).

• IPA^(key): /meditasjoːn/, [med̥itˢaˈɕoːˀn]

meditation c (singular definite meditationen, plural indefinite meditationer)

1. meditation
2. pondering

• meditation on the Danish Wikipedia.Wikipedia ^da

meditation c

1. meditation

• meditera (“meditate”)

• meditation in Svensk ordbok (SO)
• meditation in Svenska Akademiens ordlista (SAOL)
• meditation in Svenska Akademiens ordbok (SAOB)