EXCOGITATE verb (eks-koj-i-teyt)

verb
1. to think out; devise; invent.
2. to study intently and carefully in order to grasp or comprehend fully.


Quotes

I wouldn't put the question to you for the world, and expose you to the inconvenience of having to ... excogitate an answer.
--*Henry James,*Washington Square, 1880


The average politician knows fully as little or as much about railway management as he does about photographing the moon or applying the solar spectrum; yet, once upon a board of railway commissioners, he is required to excogitate and frame rules for an industry which not only supplies the financial arteries of a continent, but holds the lives as well as the credits of its citizens dependent upon the click of a telegraph or the angle of a semaphore ...
--*Appleton Morgan,*"The Political Control of Railways: Is It Confiscation?" Popular Science Monthly, February 1889



Origin

Excogitate comes from Latin excōgitātus, the past participle of excōgitāre meaning “to devise, invent, think out.” It entered English in the 1520s.