pensar

Forms

pensar (first-person singular present pienso, first-person singular preterite pensé, past participle pensado)^[1] Old Spanish texts also spell it penssar; the DEMel records forms such as penso, pensaua and piensa.^[2] The stressed /e/ becomes ie in the present (pienso, piensa, piense), an irregularity the Diccionario de Autoridades already noted.^[3]

Etymology

It is inherited from Old Spanish pensar, inherited from Latin pēnsō (“to weigh carefully; to consider”), the frequentative of pendō (“to weigh; to pay”).^{[4][5][1][6][7]} The Latin verb already had the figurative sense “to weigh in the mind, ponder”, and Corominas treats the Spanish verb as a semi-learned doublet of pesar “to weigh”, the popular outcome of the same Latin word.^[8][4] García de Diego and Wiktionary also call this form semi-learned.^[9][1] French has the same pair, French peser and French penser; the Latin source of the verbs meaning “to weigh” had already lost its /n/.^[10]

The verb with the sense “to think” is shared by the Romance languages of the West: Portuguese pensar, Catalan pensar, Occitan pensar and Italian pensare.^[8][11][1] In Medieval Latin pensare meant “to consider, weigh, notice” and “to discuss”, as well as “to dole out rations”.^[12]

pendō goes back to *pendō and to the Indo-European root *(s)pend- (“to pull; to spin”).^[1]

Earliest recorded meaning

The first record is in the Cantar de mio Cid (c. 1140, known from a 14th-century copy): „Allí piensan de aguijar, allí sueltan las riendas” “there they set about spurring on, there they slacken the reins”.^[13][4] The Fazienda de Ultra Mar (c. 1200) says of Esau that „penso en so coraçon quel matase” “he thought in his heart that he would kill him”, and the Cortes of León of 1208, the first text not known only from a later copy, speak of „pensando el remedio” “considering the remedy”.^[13]

Semantic evolution

In the prose of Alfonso X the verb means “to imagine, consider, reflect”, “to intend to do something” and “to take care of someone”, and the infinitive is used as a noun, los sos muy malos pensares “his very wicked thoughts” (1280).^[14] From “to take care of someone” it passed to “to give food to animals”, first in the 14th-century Libro de la montería of Alfonso XI, and this verb gave the noun pienso “fodder”, recorded from the end of the 16th century.^[8][4] García de Diego instead derives this sense of the verb from pienso, which he traces to Latin pensum “ration”, and the Academy's dictionaries of 1884 and 2001 list it as a separate verb.^[15][16][17]

Covarrubias (1611) defined it as turning something over in the memory, tracing it to the Latin frequentative pensare, because whoever thinks “weighs” things.^[18] The Academy's dictionary of 1817 lists the phrases pensar en lo excusado “to attempt the impossible”, dar en qué pensar “to give grounds for suspicion” and sin pensar “unexpectedly”.^[19] Baralt complained in 1855 that educated usage had given the verb nearly all the senses of French penser.^[20] In the Dominican Republic, Colombia and Ecuador pensar can mean “to remember someone”, and Malaret recorded pensar a in this sense in Colombia.^[21][22]

Timeline

• c. 1140 – first record, in the Cantar de mio Cid (14th-century copy).^[13][4]
• 1208 – the Cortes of León, the earliest text with the verb that survives in a contemporary copy.^[13]
• 1220–1250 – first record of the noun pensamiento.^[4]
• 1254 – the earliest record in the HSMS texts, Alfonso X's Judizios de las estrellas.^[23][14]
• 14th century – the sense “to give food to animals”, in the Libro de la montería.^[8]
• 1438 – first record of pensativo.^[4]
• c. 1495 – Nebrija gives Latin cogito, meditor and puto as its equivalents.^[24]
• 1521 – the first record from the Americas, in Cuba.^[25]
• 1611 – Covarrubias links it to Latin pendere “to weigh”.^[18]
• 1884 – the Academy's dictionary first gives the etymology, “Del lat. pensare”, and the proverb piensa mal y acertarás.^[16]

Meanings

Verb

1. To think: to form and combine ideas or judgements in the mind: Pienso mejor por la mañana.^[5][1]
2. To examine something carefully in order to form a judgement; to consider, ponder: Piénsalo con calma antes de firmar.^[5][1]
3. To hold an opinion about someone or something: ¿Qué piensas de su novela?^[5][1]
4. To intend to do something (with an infinitive): Pensamos volver en agosto.^[5][1]
5. To give pienso (fodder) to animals.^[5]
6. (intransitive, with en) To form a judgement on something; to have someone or something in mind, remember them: Pensaba en su madre.^[5]
7. (intransitive, with en) To take someone into account when acting: Nunca piensa en sus vecinos.^[5]
8. (Dominican Republic, Colombia, Ecuador) To remember someone.^[5][21]

Word family

• pensador
• pensamiento
• pensativo
• pienso
• repensar
• penseque
• malpensar

Related words

• pesar
• peso
• pensión
• compensar
• dispensar
• Latin pēnsō
• French penser

Usage notes

Common phrases are ni pensarlo “out of the question” and pensar mal de alguien “to suspect someone”.^[5] The proverb piensa mal y acertarás “think ill and you will be right” is in the Academy's dictionary from 1884.^[16]

References

1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ Diccionario del Español Medieval electrónico (DEMel), data publication 2026 (CC BY-SA), Universität Rostock, p. s.v. pensar
3. ^ Real Academia Española (1726–1739), Diccionario de la lengua castellana (Diccionario de Autoridades), 6 vols., Madrid: Francisco del Hierro, p. 5, 206
4. ^ a b c d e f g Corominas, Joan (1973), Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. pensar
5. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Real Academia Española; Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (2014–), Diccionario de la lengua española, 23rd ed., online version 23.8, https://dle.rae.es, p. s.v. pensar
6. ^ Lewis, Charlton T.; Short, Charles (1879), A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
7. ^ Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
8. ^ a b c d Corominas, Joan; Pascual, José A. (1980–1991), Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, 6 vols., Madrid: Gredos, p. 4, 503
9. ^ García de Diego, Vicente (1985), Diccionario etimológico español e hispánico, 2nd ed., Madrid: Espasa-Calpe (1st ed. 1954), p. 4924
10. ^ Rey, Alain, ed. (1992), Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, Paris: Le Robert
11. ^ Cunha, Antônio Geraldo da (2010), Dicionário etimológico da língua portuguesa, 4th ed., Rio de Janeiro: Lexikon, p. 2530
12. ^ Niermeyer, J. F. (1976), Mediae Latinitatis Lexicon Minus, Leiden: Brill
13. ^ a b c d Real Academia Española (2013–), Corpus del Diccionario histórico de la lengua española (CDH), version 3.1, https://apps.rae.es/CNDHE, p. s.v. pensar
14. ^ a b Kasten, Lloyd A.; Nitti, John J.; Gago Jover, Francisco (2002–), Diccionario de la prosa castellana del Rey Alfonso X, New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies (electronic edition 2024), p. s.v. pensar
15. ^ García de Diego, Vicente (1985), Diccionario etimológico español e hispánico, 2nd ed., Madrid: Espasa-Calpe (1st ed. 1954), p. 4926
16. ^ a b c Real Academia Española (1884), Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 12th ed., Madrid: Imprenta de D. Gregorio Hernando (the first Academy edition with etymologies), p. 812
17. ^ Real Academia Española (2001), Diccionario de la lengua española, 22nd ed., Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, p. s.v. pensar
18. ^ a b Covarrubias Orozco, Sebastián de (1611), Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, Madrid: Luis Sánchez (Biblioteca Wordkers transcription, CC BY 4.0), p. 1205
19. ^ Real Academia Española (1817), Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 5th ed., Madrid: Imprenta Real, p. 658
20. ^ Baralt, Rafael María (1855), Diccionario de galicismos, Madrid: Imprenta de J. Cruzado, p. 510
21. ^ a b Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (2010), Diccionario de americanismos, Lima: Santillana; online at https://www.asale.org/damer, p. s.v. pensar
22. ^ Malaret, Augusto (1946), Diccionario de americanismos, 3rd ed., Buenos Aires: Emecé, p. 641
23. ^ Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies (2026), Old Spanish Textual Archive (OSTA): semi-paleographic transcriptions of Old Spanish texts, ed. Francisco Gago Jover et al., https://www.hispanicseminary.org, p. s.v. pensar
24. ^ Nebrija, Antonio de (1513), Vocabulario español-latino, Salamanca, ed. Marina Vidal Díez (2007), Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, p. 395
25. ^ Boyd-Bowman, Peter (2003), Léxico hispanoamericano 1493–1993, ed. Ray Harris-Northall and John J. Nitti, New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, p. s.v. pensar