All 19 Uses of
comprehend
in
Bleak House
- Standing on a seat at the side of the hall, the better to peer into the curtained sanctuary, is a little mad old woman in a squeezed bonnet who is always in court, from its sitting to its rising, and always expecting some incomprehensible judgment to be given in her favour.†
Chpt 1-3
- I have mentioned that unless my vanity should deceive me (as I know it may, for I may be very vain without suspecting it, though indeed I don't), my comprehension is quickened when my affection is.†
Chpt 1-3
- "I began to keep the little creatures," she said, "with an object that the wards will readily comprehend.†
Chpt 4-6
- The brilliant and distinguished circle comprehends within it no contracted amount of education, sense, courage, honour, beauty, and virtue.†
Chpt 10-12
- Mr. Tulkinghorn, comprehending it, inclines his head and says he is much obliged.†
Chpt 10-12 *
- "How much of this indecision of character," Mr. Jarndyce said to me, "is chargeable on that incomprehensible heap of uncertainty and procrastination on which he has been thrown from his birth, I don't pretend to say; but that Chancery, among its other sins, is responsible for some of it, I can plainly see.†
Chpt 13-15
- They appeared to me to be quite beyond his comprehension, for when Caddy took me into the dining-room by mistake and we came upon Mr. Jellyby in his spectacles, forlornly fenced into a corner by the great dining-table and the two gentlemen, he seemed to have given up the whole thing and to be speechless and insensible.†
Chpt 22-24
- …under him looking at one another and at the spectators as if nobody had ever heard that all over England the name in which they were assembled was a bitter jest, was held in universal horror, contempt, and indignation, was known for something so flagrant and bad that little short of a miracle could bring any good out of it to any one—this was so curious and selfcontradictory to me, who had no experience of it, that it was at first incredible, and I could not comprehend it.†
Chpt 22-24
- "Or, my juvenile friends," says Chadband, descending to the level of their comprehension with a very obtrusive demonstration in his greasily meek smile of coming a long way downstairs for the purpose, "if the master of this house was to go forth into the city and there see an eel, and was to come back, and was to call unto him the mistress of this house, and was to say, 'Sarah, rejoice with me, for I have seen an elephant!' would THAT be Terewth?"†
Chpt 25-27
- And why the devil that young woman won't sit down like a Christian," says Mr. George with his eyes musingly fixed on Judy, "I can't comprehend."†
Chpt 25-27
- "Then, Mr. Rouncewell," returns Sir Leicester, "the application of what you have said is, to me, incomprehensible."†
Chpt 28-30
- "Will it be more comprehensible, Sir Leicester, if I say," the ironmaster is reddening a little, "that I do not regard the village school as teaching everything desirable to be known by my son's wife?"†
Chpt 28-30
- It was a large prison with many courts and passages so like one another and so uniformly paved that I seemed to gain a new comprehension, as I passed along, of the fondness that solitary prisoners, shut up among the same staring walls from year to year, have had—as I have read—for a weed or a stray blade of grass.†
Chpt 52-54
- Between whiles, Mrs. Bagnet looked at me; and I understood from the play of her eyes that she wished me to do something, though I did not comprehend what.†
Chpt 52-54
- With such sounds he now breaks silence, soon, however, controlling himself to say that he does not comprehend why a gentleman so faithful and zealous as the late Mr. Tulkinghorn should have communicated to him nothing of this painful, this distressing, this unlooked-for, this overwhelming, this incredible intelligence.†
Chpt 52-54
- But when this change begins, it goes on; and by and by he nods or moves his eyes or even his hand in token that he hears and comprehends.†
Chpt 55-57
- We were soon in Saint Albans and alighted a little before day, when I was just beginning to arrange and comprehend the occurrences of the night and really to believe that they were not a dream.†
Chpt 55-57
- I saw but did not comprehend the solemn and compassionate look in Mr. Woodcourt's face.†
Chpt 58-60
- I saw but did not comprehend his touching the other on the breast to keep him back.†
Chpt 58-60
Definition:
-
(comprehend) to understand something -- especially to understand it completely