All 4 Uses of
comprehend
in
The War of the Worlds
- For a long time my brother stared out of the window in blank astonishment, watching the policemen hammering at door after door, and delivering their incomprehensible message.†
Chpt 1.14incomprehensible = not understandablestandard prefix: The prefix "in-" in incomprehensible means not and reverses the meaning of comprehensible. This is the same pattern you see in words like invisible, incomplete, and insecure.
- Our situation was so strange and incomprehensible that for three or four hours, until the dawn came, we scarcely moved.†
Chpt 2.1 *
- Here and there they were scattered, nearly fifty altogether, in that great gulf they had made, overtaken by a death that must have seemed to them as incomprehensible as any death could be.†
Chpt 2.8
- To me also at that time this death was incomprehensible.†
Chpt 2.8
Definitions:
-
(1)
(comprehend) to understand something -- especially to understand it completely
-
(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) meaning too rare to warrant focus:
Much more rarely (and more frequently in the past), comprehend can mean to include as part of something broader. That was the first sense of the word listed in Webster's Dictionary of 1828 with this sample sentence: "The empire of Great Britain comprehends England, Scotland and Ireland, with their dependencies."