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Vegetate   /vˈɛdʒətˌeɪt/   Listen
Vegetate

verb
(past & past part. vegetated; pres. part. vegetating)
1.
Lead a passive existence without using one's body or mind.
2.
Establish vegetation on.
3.
Produce vegetation.
4.
Grow like a plant.
5.
Grow or spread abnormally.
6.
Propagate asexually.
7.
Engage in passive relaxation.  Synonym: vege out.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Vegetate" Quotes from Famous Books



... greatly maligned by the English Press. For this great prison-land is not always one of dungeons and lifelong incarceration. The latter certainly awaits the active revolutionist, but, on the other hand, an erring journalist may, for an "imprudent" paragraph, be sent to vegetate for only a couple of months within sight of the Urals. As Gilbert's "Mikado" would say, "the punishment fits the crime." And in the towns of Western Siberia I have frequently met men originally banished for a short term who, rather than return to Russia, have elected to remain ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt

... a small portion of the choir. The church, its transepts, north and south aisles, and chancel, are gone; and the dormitory, refectory, cloisters, &c. have scarcely left any trace of their gorgeous existence. The lonely ash and sturdy briar vegetate over the ashes of barons and prelates; and the unfeeling peasants intrude their rustic games on the holy place, ignorant of its former importance, and unconscious of the poetical feeling which its ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 12, Issue 328, August 23, 1828 • Various

... Doubter falling on a stercoraceous heap of compost, in the rear of the house, began forthwith to vegetate. Its broad brim, spread forth grandly and exfoliated, and its round crown swelled and crimped and consolidated until the whole became a prodigious cabbage, rivalling in magnitude the capacious head of the Doubter. In a word, it was the origin of that ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving

... "modern improvements," of running water and steam heat, of elevators and electric lights, it has lost its standing and is inhabited by a rather precarious and suspicious clan of pseudo artists, mountebanks who vegetate on the outskirts of art; "buckeye painters," who turn out a dozen 20x30 canvases a day for the export trade to Africa and Australia; unscrupulous fabricators of Corots and Daubignys, picture drummers who make such rascality profitable, illustrators of advertising ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 3, May 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various

... squarely with its airy and lofty houses, laid out in regular order; on the other, is huddled together the poor quarter, a miserable collection of low hovels of a conical shape, in which a poverty-stricken multitude vegetate rather than live, since Kouka is neither a trading nor a ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne

... the ground by our flowing locks, long as creeping plants, we vegetate under the shelter of our feet, which are as large as parasols; and the light reaches us through the spaces between our wide heels. No disorder and no toil! To keep the head as low as possible—that ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert

... organs, etc. In spite of the great complication of the divers living multicellular organisms, one often finds among them the power of reproduction by fission or by budding. In certain animals and plants, groups of cells vegetate in buds which separate from the body later on and form a new individual; this occurs among the polypi and plants with bulbs, etc. One can even form a tree by means of a cutting. Ants and bees, which have not been fecundated, are capable of laying eggs which ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel

... working with a sombre passion which had in it very little of the mystical joy or hope which sustain others in similar efforts; when he had scarcely a coat to his back, or a shoe to his feet; when his doctor began to talk of tuberculin tests and the high Alps; then he would wire to Duddon, and come and vegetate under Victoria's wing, for just as many weeks as were necessary to send him back to London restored to a certain physical standard. To watch Harry Tatham's wholesome, kindly, prosperous life, untroubled by any of ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... in Cho-sen, where, with the exception of those fifteen days, there is calm, too much of it, not only in the morning, in accordance with the national designation, but all through both day and night; where, month after month, people vegetate, instead of live, leading the most monotonous of all monotonous lives. It is not surprising, then, that once a year, as a kind of redeeming point, they feel the want of a vigorous re-action; and, I am sure, for such a purpose as this, ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor

... farmer returns to his fields and begins the operation of agriculture. These labours are not very difficult in a soft and yielding slime, such as the river leaves behind it. The seeds are sown, and vegetate with inconceivable rapidity, and, in a few weeks, an abundant harvest of every kind of grain covers the land. For this reason all the necessaries of life are easily procured by the innumerable multitudes which inhabit the country. Nor is the climate less favourable ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day

... opportunity. Their eldest sons always had to do something in the world, and even when in possession of the estate were by no means inclined to spend their lives as nothing but sportsmen. Certainly my ancestors never showed any inclination to vegetate, or to live gun in hand and spaniel at heel, like the squires in ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey

... fortune they live more penuriously than the poorest labourers in Chartres. Most of them simply vegetate; some perform Mass for Sisterhoods, or are convent chaplains, but that brings in very little, two hundred or two hundred and fifty francs perhaps. Another holds the post of secretary to the diocese, by which he gets rooms and as much, perhaps, as six hundred francs. Yet another conducts the ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... lowest, which are less perfect as they are farther removed. Without such preeminent perfection in things prior and simple, neither man nor any kind of animal could have come into existence from seed, and afterwards continue to exist; nor could the seeds of trees and shrubs vegetate and bear fruit. For the more prior anything prior is, or the more simple anything simple is, the more exempt is it from injury, ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg

... life, far more is required; much more than these must I find in a woman, ere I venture to ask her to be mine. I am heartily tired of my present life; it is a lonely stupid way of living; living! I don't live, I merely vegetate! I have no taste for dissipation; neither have I any great predilection ...
— A Book For The Young • Sarah French

... since the loss of her husband—now loved so deeply, though loved too late—she felt was over. The future had nothing for herself. What, therefore, could she do with the dull years in which she might long vegetate through life but to give them in useful service to those who needed help? She would go with her brother to the frontier, and find some field of labor among the Indians. She would found a school with her fortune, ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth

... thou art is born into a world where he can do no true service; when, with the soul of an apostle and the courage of a martyr, he has simply to push his way among the heartless and aimless crowds which vegetate without living; the atmosphere suffocates him and he dies. Hated by sinners, the mock of fools, disliked by the envious, abandoned by the weak, what can he do but return to God, weary with having labored in vain, in sorrow at having accomplished nothing? The world remains in all its vileness ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... harem, in which three hundred beautiful young fellows are shut up for life. So jealous is the queen, that no female is allowed to approach the walls within one hundred yards. Never beholding any of their race but the queen and a few dried-up and ugly spinsters, the poor creatures vegetate, mindless and joyless. ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg

... silly place," she said, as we sat in the veranda in the cool of evening, "I'm sure I can't imagine. We MUST go somewhere. This is maddening, maddening! Miss Wade—Dr. Cumberledge—I count upon you to discover SOMETHING for me to do. If I vegetate like this, seeing nothing all day long but those eternal hills"—she clenched her little fist—"I shall go ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen

... me yesterday, who has lately left the country, that the Pope is so glad of an excuse to keep heretics out of his dominions, that he has never taken off the quarantine: so that, under any circumstances, we must vegetate in some frontier hole for a fortnight before we can be admitted; a circumstance in itself sufficiently deterring, in my opinion. Besides which, what with the perplexity of the coinage, and the constant attempt at pillage ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... weeping willow at Twickenham with his own hands, and that it was the first of its particular species introduced into England. Happening to be with Lady Suffolk when she received a parcel from Spain, he observed that it was bound with green twigs which looked as if they might vegetate. "Perhaps," said he, "these may produce something that we have not yet in England." He tried a cutting, and it succeeded. The tree was removed by some person as barbarous as the reverend gentleman who cut down Shakespeare's Mulberry Tree. The ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson

... I don’t want to shoot you. Why should I? You don’t hinder me any. You haven’t got one pound of copra but what you made with your own hands, like a negro slave. You’re vegetating—that’s what I call it—and I don’t care where you vegetate, nor yet how long. Give me your word you don’t mean to shoot me, and I’ll give you ...
— Island Nights' Entertainments • Robert Louis Stevenson

... bourgeois society. The medieval burgesses and the small peasant proprietors were the precursors of the modern bourgeoisie. In those countries which are but little developed, industrially and commercially these two classes still vegetate side by side ...
— Manifesto of the Communist Party • Karl Marx

... refined temper; how empty do they soon find the world of enjoyments worth their desire or attaining! How soon do they retreat to solitude and contemplation, to gardening and planting, and such rural amusements, where their trees and they enjoy the air and the sun in common, and both vegetate with very little difference between them. But suppose (which neither truth nor wisdom will allow) we could admit something more valuable and substantial in these blessings, would not the uncertainty of their possession be alone sufficient to lower their price? How mean a tenure is that ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding

... lassitude of the body reacts upon the mind. "In this scorching region one can only vegetate. Insanity is commonly the result of hard study and excessive application." Voyage, ii, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair

... by the war, but on the contrary it served to tranquilise it. When the herd draws itself together in arms against the stranger it is a fall for those rare free spirits who love the whole world, but it raises the many who weakly vegetate in anarchistic egotism, and lifts them to that higher stage of organised selfishness. Camus woke up all at once, with the feeling that for the first time he was not ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain

... Major's partial acquiescence, had felt herself no longer obliged to vegetate at Carminster, but had started for Bath, while the roads were still practicable; and had at the same time sent off a courier with letters to Bowstead. Kind Mrs. Dove had sent a little packet to each of the children, but they found Cousin Aura's sympathy grievously and unwontedly lacking, and ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge

... Therefore we also must take leave of the Rito de los Frijoles. Of its inhabitants nothing striking can hereafter be told. They lived and died in the seclusion of their valley gorge, and neither the Tehuas nor the Navajos molested them in the years following. Tyope continued to vegetate, anxiously taking care to give no occasion for recalling his former conduct. The Naua soon died. The subsequent fate of the tribe is faintly delineated by dim historical traditions, stating that they gradually emigrated from the Rito in various bands, which little by little, in course of ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier

... containing two or three seeds, of a mouse colour, including each a kernel. These are the seeds by which the plant is propagated, a number, from six to twelve, or fifteen, being promiscuously put into one hole, four or five inches deep, at certain distances from each other. The seeds vegetate without any other care, though the more industrious annually remove the weeds and manure the land. The leaves which succeed are not fit to be plucked before the third year's growth, at which period ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume X, No. 280, Saturday, October 27, 1827. • Various

... of farmer—of whom we have too many—content to vegetate like a lower organism, making scarcely more mental effort than one of his own potatoes, parsnips or pumpkins. As the pages that follow will reveal, he was one of the first American experimental agriculturists, always alert for better methods, willing to take ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth

... to our expectations. I am constantly asking myself which is better,—our old Europe, where the man of exceptional gifts can give himself absolutely to study, opening thus a wider horizon for the human mind, while at his side thousands barely vegetate in degradation or at least in destitution; or this new world, where the institutions tend to keep all on one level as part of the general mass,—but a mass, be it said, which has no noxious elements. Yes, the mass here is decidedly good. All the world ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz

... were once the capitals of a little feudal State,—a county or duchy conquered by the crown or divided among many heirs, if the male line failed. Disinherited from active life, these heads became arms; and arms deprived of nourishment, wither and barely vegetate. ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac

... the eaves gardens in the air. The ridgepoles stood transformed into beds of flowers; their long tufts of grass waved in the wind, the blossoms nodding their heads amicably to the passers-by. What a contented folk this should be whose very homes can so vegetate! Surely a pretty conceit it is for a peasantry thus to sleep every night under the sod, and yet awake each morning to ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell

... piano-forte which figured in his small parlor, and by his sending his only child, a daughter, to a city boarding-school. She returned, as might have been expected, with ideas and desires far beyond the hill-side cottage where she was condemned to vegetate. Now she was very pretty, with dancing blue eyes and a profusion of golden curls; she had, too, a most winning manner, hard for any one to resist; and these personal attractions, added to style of dress that had never been seen or imagined among ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various

... country, and my time passed pleasantly enough while I cut down the trees, built my house, and planted my different crops. But winter and idleness came, and I longed for more elegant society, to hear what was passing in the world, and to do something better than vegetate with the animals that made a very considerable part of my household. Consequently, I determined to travel. Motion was a substitute for variety of objects; and, passing over immense tracks of country, I exhausted my exuberant spirits, without obtaining much experience. ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft

... have staid to the end of his time, and must be punished for returning to Paris. "But," continued the delinquent, "the vile little hole to which I was exiled contained no society whatever, the inhabitants were merely a set of illiterate beings, and how could any enlightened person vegetate amongst such a mic-mac of semi-barbarians; but tell me, M. le President, what has become of ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve

... mountains gilding their outline, and the day is done. Not a single dust-speck has soiled sky or earth; not the faintest echo of noisy labours disturbed the silences; not an alien sight has intruded. What can there be in such a scene to exhilarate? Must not the inhabitants vegetate dully after the style of their own bananas? Actually the day has been all too brief for the accomplishment of inevitable duties and to the complete enjoyment of ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... to live or have a chance of working again, he must go to the seaside and vegetate, attempt nothing for the next six months, nor even think about St. Matthew's for a year, and, as they told me afterwards, be only able to go on ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge

... was,—not too successfully, as would appear. Eight years ago, "in 1726," Mamma sent him off upon his travels; to Geneva, Italy, France: he looked in upon Vienna, too; got a Lieutenant-Colonelcy in the Kaiser's Service, but did not like it; soon gave it up; and returned home to vegetate, perhaps to seek a wife,—having prospects of succession in Strelitz. For the Serene Half-Brother proves to have no children: were his tailoring once finished in the world, our Prince of Mirow is Duke in Chief. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle

... that angel has made me so good, so happy. I used to vegetate, but now I live. Live! I walk on wings, and tread on roses. Yet you insist on declining a few miserable louis d'or from him who owes you so much. Well, don't be angry; I'll take them back, and throw them into the nearest ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade

... nature, for nothing physiologically analogous occurs anywhere else. Krempelhuber has argued that there are no conclusive reasons against the assumption that the lichen-gonidia may be self-developed organs of the lichen proper rather than algae, and that these gonidia can continue to vegetate separately, and so be mistaken for unicellular algae." In this Th. Fries seems substantially to concur. But there is one strong argument, or rather a repetition of an argument already cited, placed in a much stronger light, which is employed by Nylander ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke

... this state it would for ever remain a barren sand, had not Divine Providence given birth to the cocoa-nut tree, whose fruit is so protected with a hard shell, that after floating about for a twelve-month in the sea, it will vegetate, take root, and grow in those salt marshes, lagoons, incipient islands, or what you please to call them. Their roots serve to bind the surface of the coral; and the annual shedding of their leaves, in time creates a soil which produces a verdure or undergrowth. ...
— Voyage of H.M.S. Pandora - Despatched to Arrest the Mutineers of the 'Bounty' in the - South Seas, 1790-1791 • Edward Edwards



Words linked to "Vegetate" :   unwind, slow down, vegetation, relax, live, propagate, decompress, grow, unbend, biological science, biology, vegetative, loosen up



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