conceive

Verb

1. To have a child; to become pregnant (with).
   • Assisted procreation can help those trying to conceive.
   • She hath also conceived a son in her old age. - 1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Luke 1:36:
2. To develop; to form in the mind; to imagine.
   • It was among the ruins of the Capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised near twenty years of my life. - 1776, Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman...
   • At the mouth of the cave we found a single litter with six bearers, all of them mutes, waiting, and with them I was relieved to see our old friend Billali, for whom I had conceived a sort of affection. - 1886 October –...
   • There are, moreover, grounds for thinking that the Rosaline of Love’s Labour’s Lost was originally conceived of by Shakespeare as pale with black eyes—... - 1890, Thomas Tyler, Shakespeare's Sonnets, D. Nutt, page 81:
3. To imagine (as); to have a conception of; to form a representation of.
   • Can you conceive of him as a leader?
   • We shall, / As I conceive the journey, be at the Mount / Before you, Lepidus. - c. 1606–1607 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Anthonie and Cleopatra”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies,...
   • […]you will hardly conceive him to have been bred in the ſame Climate […] - 1731 (date written), Simon Wagstaff [pseudonym; Jonathan Swift], “An Introduction to the Following Treatise”, in A Complete Collection of...
4. To understand (someone).
   • I conceive you. - 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne, chapter 3, in The Scarlet Letter, a Romance, Boston, Mass.: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, →OCLC: