excogitate

Pending her appearance, he filled the spirit-stove, put the kettle on to boil, and lighting a cigarette, sat himself down to watch the pot and excogitate his several problems.

From The Lone Wolf A Melodrama by Louis Joseph Vance

Bein’ hot I lay down in the lee of a bush to excogitate.

From Black Ivory by Francis B. Pearson

The following series of possibilities are curiously interesting, both from their partial subsequent realization, and from the simple credulity with which Bacon gives us that which he had known "a wise man explicitly excogitate."

From Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 368, June 1846 by Various

In fact, it must require a considerable effort to excogitate novel labor-saving devices.

From By Water to the Columbian Exposition by Johanna S. Wisthaler

Here the little thinker is not often left to excogitate a theory for himself.

From Children's Ways by James Sully

Last month, having excogitated 290 questions and created perhaps the most elaborate thinking test ever devised, they stunned a group of the nation's smartest high-school graduates with it.

From Time Magazine Archive

When the idea is accepted odd devices are excogitated by the active little brain for making it intelligible.

From Children's Ways by James Sully

I can’t say as I did, sir, but it was cooriously enough excogitated for me.

From Black Ivory by Francis B. Pearson

If, then, there were several systems excogitated, equally satisfying to our purely logical needs, they would still have to be passed in review, and approved or rejected by our aesthetic and practical nature.

From The Will to Believe : and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy by William James

It is always peculiarly fascinating, therefore, to subject to direct verification by observation, that is, to render palpable to the senses, something which we have only theoretically excogitated or theoretically surmised.

From Popular scientific lectures by Ernst Mach

It features essays by 22 scholars, all solemnly excogitating on such weighty matters as whether the horseshoes in his pictures are from dray horses or Thoroughbreds.

From Time Magazine Archive

An execrable Triumvirate—a scandalum magnatum to all public bodies: I suppose they and their adherents are now sitting in Pandemonium, excogitating their diabolical machinations against us.

From The Politician Out-Witted by Montrose Jonas Moses

Hence, too, it is that we hunt through the mental train, excogitating from the present or some other, and from similar or contrary or coadjacent.

From Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Slice 7 "Arundel, Thomas" to "Athens" by Various

It is a marvellous thing that they who engage in excogitating this kind of double-meaning literature about bimetallism, should suppose that the people can any longer be deluded with it.

From The Arena Volume 18, No. 93, August, 1897 by Various

He set about excogitating an alphabet; but actually forgot to give names to his letters, which afterwards baffled him before literary men.

From Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 by Isaac Disraeli