Make Your Point: GESTATE

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pronounce GESTATE:

JEST ate

connect this word to others:

Inside our word gestate, which literally means "to be pregnant with," you can almost glimpse the Latin gerere, "to bear, or to carry."

Gerere also gave us words like digest, ingest, congested, register, gesticulate, suggest (literally "to carry from beneath"), exaggerate (literally "to carry [a lot] to") and b___igerent (literally "war-carrying, war-bearing," and less literally "hostile, as if eager to start a war").

(To reveal any word with blanks, give it a click.)

definition:

In a literal sense, when a living thing gestates inside its mother, it's growing and developing, getting ready to be born.

And in a figurative sense, when work, ideas, and projects gestate, they develop slowly and thoughtfully before they go public or take their final form, as if they're living creatures soon to be born.

grammatical bits:

Part of speech:

Verb, usually the intransitive kind: "The idea had to gestate;" "Writing gets better if you let it gestate a while."

And sometimes the transitive kind: "He gestated the idea;" "We gestated our writing."

Other forms:

.The other verb forms are "gestated" and "gestating."

The noun is "gestation."

For an adjective, you can take your pick: "gestative," "gestatorial," or "gestational." Or just use the verb forms: "a gestated plan," "a gestating plan."

how to use it:

Pick the somewhat rare, scientific-sounding word "gestate" when you want to compare a developing idea to a developing fetus.

You might talk about plans, ideas, projects, and other creations that gestate, meaning they develop in your mind, or develop in reality, before being "birthed" into the wide world.

You might say that something gestating within you or in your mind, or in some place or group of people.

Typically, we use "gestate" intransitively, talking about ideas that gestate. But some people do use "gestate" transitively, talking about people gestating their ideas.

examples:

"The record's a good idea, and a good start; the band needs more time to gestate."
— Ben Ratliff, New York Times, 24 December 2012

"She helped launch screenwriter Robert Towne's career, back when he was gestating a convoluted yarn about Los Angeles water rights that became 'Chinatown.'"
— Ann Hornaday, Washington Post, 6 August 2021

has this page helped you understand "gestate"?

Awesome, I'm glad it helped!

Thanks for letting me know!
If you have any questions about this term, please message me at Liesl@HiloTutor.com.

study it:

Explain the meaning of "gestate" without saying "take shape" or "conceptualize."

try it out:

Fill in the blanks: "(Something) seems to have been gestating since (some long-ago time)."

Example 1: "I launched Make Your Point in 2015, but I think it was gestating since high school, when I'd collect cool words like they were rare coins."

Example 2: "The Green Hornet is one of those films that seem to have been gestating since some time in the Cretaceous period."
— Ben Child, The Guardian, 22 June 2010

before you review, play:

Try to spend 20 seconds or more on the game below. Don’t skip straight to the review—first, let your working memory empty out.

Our game for this month is Confounding Contronyms!

In each issue, I'll give you two quotes, each with a blank. The same word goes in both blanks—but it means opposite things. Your job is to come up with that word: that slippery little contronym. To see the hints, highlight the hidden white text. To see the answer, scroll to the bottom.

Try this today:

Quote 1: "When Southam began injecting people with HeLa cells in 1954, there was no formal research _____ in the United States."
— Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, 2010

Quote 2: "Since the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans did not have zero, the Western calendar does not have any zeros—an _____ that would cause problems millennia later."
— Charles Seife, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, 2000

Hint 1: This word starts with the letter... O.

Hint 2: This word means both... "the act of watching carefully" and "the act of forgetting something, as if not having watched for it."

review this word:

1. In its figurative sense, the opposite of GESTATE could be

A. TRIVIALIZE: treat something like it doesn't matter much.
B. TRITURATE: grind something down bit by bit, slowly destroying it.
C. TRUCKLE: yield or submit to people in a weak or timid way, as if you're sleeping on the floor below them.

2. Knowing the etymology and literal meaning of "gestate," you can figure out that a gestatorial chair is used to _____.

A. carry the Pope
B. ease muscle pain
C. swivel dramatically

a final word:

I hope you're enjoying Make Your Point. It's made with love.

I'm Liesl Johnson, a reading and writing tutor on a mission to explore, illuminate, and celebrate words.

From my blog:
On vocabulary...
  36 ways to study words.
  Why we forget words, & how to remember them.
  How to use sophisticated words without being awkward.
On writing...
How to improve any sentence.
How to motivate our kids to write.
How to stop procrastinating and start writing.
How to bulk up your writing when you have to meet a word count.

From my heart: a profound thanks to the generous patrons, donors, and sponsors that make it possible for me to write these emails. If you'd like to be a patron or a donor, please click here. If you'd like to be a sponsor and include your ad in an issue, please contact me at Liesl@HiloTutor.com.

A disclaimer: When I write definitions, I use plain language and stick to the words' common, useful applications. If you're interested in authoritative and multiple definitions of words, I encourage you to check a dictionary. Also, because I'm American, I stick to American English when I share words' meanings, usage, and pronunciations; these elements sometimes vary across world Englishes.

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