adjective
- preoccupied with depressing, morbid, or painful memories or thoughts: a brooding frame of mind.
- cast in subdued light so as to convey a somewhat threatening atmosphere: Dusk fell on the brooding hills.
noun
- a number of young produced or hatched at one time; a family of offspring or young.
- a breed, species, group, or kind: The museum exhibited a brood of monumental sculptures.
verb (used with object)
- to sit upon (eggs) to hatch, as a bird; incubate.
- (of a bird) to warm, protect, or cover (young) with the wings or body.
- to think or worry persistently or moodily about; ponder: He brooded the problem.
verb (used without object)
- to sit upon eggs to be hatched, as a bird.
- to dwell on a subject or to meditate with morbid persistence (usually followed by over or on).
adjective
- kept for breeding: a brood hen.
Verb Phrases
- brood above/over, to cover, loom, or seem to fill the atmosphere or scene: The haunted house on the hill brooded above the village.
noun
- a number of young animals, esp birds, produced at one hatching
- all the offspring in one family: often used jokingly or contemptuously
- a group of a particular kind; breed
- (as modifier) kept for breedinga brood mare
verb
- (of a bird)
- to sit on or hatch (eggs)
- (tr)to cover (young birds) protectively with the wings
- (when intr , often foll by on, over or upon) to ponder morbidly or persistently
1640s, “hovering, overhanging” (as a mother bird does her nest), from present participle of brood (v.); meaning “that dwells moodily” first attested 1818 (in “Frankenstein”).
“action of incubating,” c.1400, verbal noun from brood (v.). Figuratively (of weather, etc.) from 1805; of mental fixations by 1873. Related: Broodingly.
Old English brod “brood, fetus, hatchling,” from Proto-Germanic *brod (cf. Middle Dutch broet, Old High German bruot, German Brut “brood”), literally “that which is hatched by heat,” from *bro- “to warm, heat,” from PIE *bhre- “burn, heat, incubate,” from root *bhreue- “to boil, bubble, effervesce, burn” (see brew (v.)).
“sit on eggs, hatch,” mid-15c., from brood (n.). The figurative meaning (“to incubate in the mind”) is first recorded 1570s, from notion of “nursing” one’s anger, resentment, etc. Related: Brooded; brooding.
n.
- litter