brooding
brooding Lexical Profile
brooding Game Scores & Validity
• adjective
Engaged in or showing deep, sombre, or melancholic thought about something that makes one unhappy or anxious.
"The protagonist was portrayed as a brooding loner who rarely spoke about his troubled past."
Darkly menacing, ominous, or sinister in atmosphere or appearance.
"A brooding silence hung over the abandoned valley just before the thunderstorm broke."
• noun
The act or state of dwelling gloomily, anxiously, or obsessively on a distressing subject.
"Hours of solitary brooding did nothing to resolve his predicament."
The behavior of a bird or other animal sitting on eggs to incubate them or sheltering newly hatched young.
"During the brooding period, both parent birds take turns keeping the nest warm."
• Rhymes for brooding
• Nearby Words
Word Origin & Etymology
From the verb 'brood', derived from the Old English noun 'brōd' (offspring, hatching), which traces back to a Proto-Germanic root meaning to warm or heat. The figurative sense of dwelling darkly on troubled thoughts emerged in the late 16th century from the image of a bird sitting silently and motionless on its nest.