comprehend

To understand or grasp fully and thoroughly; to plumb.

Verb

To understand or grasp fully and thoroughly; to plumb.
- I just can't comprehend how someone could be a butcher and vegetarian at the same time.
- Our ſoules, whoſe faculties can comprehend The wondrous Architecture of the world: And meaſure euery wandring planets courſe, Still climing after knowledge infinite, […] - c. 1587–1588 (date written), [Christopher...
Synonyms: see
To include, comprise; to contain.
- And lothly mouth, unmeete a mouth to bee, / That nought but gall and venim comprehended […]. - 1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book IV, Canto I”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC:
- The King being resolved to have a Peace concluded at any Rate, sent us at last to Monsieur des Farges, who would hearken to no Treaty, without allowing us the benefit of being comprehended in it, by which means our...
- In the second century of the Christian Æra, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind. - 1776, Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the...

From Middle English comprehenden, from Latin comprehendere (“to grasp”), from the prefix com- + prehendere (“to seize”). Doublet of comprend.