Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • intransitive verb To chew (food).
  • intransitive verb To grind and knead (rubber, for example) into a pulp.
  • intransitive verb To chew food.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To grind with the teeth, and prepare for swallowing and digestion; chew: as, to masticate food.
  • To prepare for use by cutting or kneading, as with a masticator.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • transitive verb To grind or crush with, or as with, the teeth and prepare for swallowing and digestion; to chew.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • verb transitive To chew (food).
  • verb transitive To grind or knead something into a pulp.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • verb grind and knead
  • verb chew (food); to bite and grind with the teeth

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Late Latin masticāre, masticāt-, to masticate, from Greek mastikhān, to grind the teeth.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From the past participle stem of post-Classical Latin masticō ("I chew"), from Ancient Greek μαστιχάω (mastikhaō, "I grind the teeth").

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Examples

Comments

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  • I could masticate sausages all day long.

    October 19, 2007

  • I'll masticate your sausage.

    June 30, 2008

  • very naughty....

    August 19, 2008

  • I masticate 3 times a day.

    June 10, 2009

  • after a long day at camp, the boys masticated furiously

    November 6, 2009

  • Did they comminute anything?

    November 6, 2009

  • "...and Loopin was masticating to it!"

    January 29, 2010

  • I learned from a Gastropod podcast about an early version of chewing gum that people used to chew resin from the mastic tree. https://gastropod.com/gums-the-word-a-sticky-story/ (picture at link). So. The resin came from the tree name came from the French/Latin Greek verb?

    March 28, 2022