ferment

What it means

1. To react, using fermentation; especially to produce alcohol by aging or by allowing yeast to act on sugars; to brew.

   1 more example

   The cleanup job would turn out to be possibly second only to body-recovery duty in terms of being a job that nobody wanted to get assigned to. Imagine, for a moment, a thick soup of oil, paper, ink, clothing, raw meat and other fresh provisions, and worse, that had all been left to collect together in semi-warm water, all enclosed in a large metal container that had then been subjected to heating by first fire and then repeated warm Hawaiian days, and then left to ferment for over a month, and then with most of the water drained away and all the remaining solid and semi-liquid mass collecting together in pools and heaps across multiple decks, still in a relatively-enclosed environment.

   2020 November 18, Drachinifel, 6:21 from the start, in The Salvage of Pearl Harbor Pt 2 - Up She Rises!, archived from the original on 22 Oct 2022

2. To stir up, agitate, cause unrest or excitement in.

   Ye vigorous swains! while youth ferments your blood.

   1713, [Alexander] Pope, Windsor-Forest. […], London: […] Bernard Lintott […], →OCLC

   1 more example

   Pleas'd have I wander'd thro' your rough domain; / Trod the pure virgin-ſnows, myſelf as pure; / Heard the winds roar, and the big torrent burſt; / Or ſeen the deep fermenting tempeſt brew'd, / In the grim evening ſky.

   a. 1749 (date written), James Thomson, “Winter”, in The Seasons, London: […] A[ndrew] Millar, and sold by Thomas Cadell, […], published 1768, →OCLC, page 165, lines 10–14

In a sentence

Ye vigorous swains! while youth ferments your blood.

1713, [Alexander] Pope, Windsor-Forest. […], London: […] Bernard Lintott […], →OCLC

Where it comes from

1. Latinfermentāre“to leaven, ferment”
2. Middle Frenchferment
3. Middle Englishferment
4. Englishferment

From Middle English ferment, from Middle French ferment, from Latin fermentāre (“to leaven, ferment”), from fermentum (“substance causing fermentation”), possibly from contraction of *fervimentum, from fervēre. See also fervent.