meditation
/mɛdɪˈteɪʃn̩/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: 3.95 in modern English
13
Scrabble Score
10
Letters
4
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
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.
Countable; Uncountable
noun
A contemplative discourse, often on a religious or philosophical subject.
Countable; Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "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."
- "Her book is less a cookbook than a meditation on the craft of cookery."
- "deep meditation"
- "in meditation"
- "He was lost in careful meditation on how best to proceed when a sudden phone call forced him to decide."
Etymology
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”).
Origin
- Source language: Old French
Word Breakdown
Usage
Subject
Wiktionary places this term in Religion.