Verb

(en verb)

* 1596 , (Edmund Spenser), The Faerie Queene , IV.1:

And lothly mouth, unmeete a mouth to bee, / That nought but gall and venim comprehended […].

* 1776 , (Edward Gibbon), The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , Penguin 2009, p. 9:

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.

To understand or grasp fully and thoroughly.

Verb

(conceiv)

To develop an idea; to form in the mind; to plan; to devise; to originate.

* 1606 , , Shakespeare, II-4

We shall, / As I conceive the journey, be at the Mount / Before you, Lepidus.

* Gibbon

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.

*

, title=(The Celebrity), chapter=3 , passage=Now all this was very fine, but not at all in keeping with the Celebrity's character as I had come to conceive it. The idea that adulation ever cloyed on him was ludicrous in itself. In fact I thought the whole story fishy, and came very near to saying so.}}

To understand (someone).

* Nathaniel Hawthorne

I conceive you.

* Jonathan Swift

You will hardly conceive him to have been bred in the same climate.

(senseid)(intransitive, or, transitive) To become pregnant.

* Bible, Luke i. 36

She hath also conceived a son in her old age.