Develop

dɪˈvɛləp

verb

to grow or cause to grow and become more mature, advanced, or elaborate

The word 'develop' comes from the Old French word 'desveloper', which means to unwrap or reveal. It originally referred to the uncovering or unfolding of something, and its meaning has expanded over time to include growth and improvement.

“And what then, eh?” “So he established two foundations at the extreme opposing ends of the Galaxy – Foundations of the best, and the youngest, and the strongest, there to breed, grow, and develop.

Asimov, Isaac

Foundation 2 - Foundation and Empire

Her mind was less difficult to develop.

Jane Austen

Pride and Prejudice

These, and the indulgence of his publisher, allowed Tolkien a luxury few authors enjoy: multiple chances not only to correct his text but to improve it, and to further develop the languages, geography, and peoples of Middle-earth.

J. R. R. Tolkien

The Fellowship of the Ring

Only the vicissitudes of life can show us its vanity and develop our innate love of death or of rebirth to a new life.” These words are all the more remarkable because, in spite of his great physical sufferings, Osip Alexéevich is never weary of life though he loves death, for which—in spite of the purity and loftiness of his inner man—he does not yet feel himself sufficiently prepared.

Leo Tolstoy

War and Peace

Nick wondered, not for the first time that day, when he would start to sneeze and run a fever and develop those peculiar swellings on his neck.

King, Stephen

The Stand

People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.

Herbert, Frank

Dune

An hour later, they had made very little progress, though their table was littered with bits of parchment bearing sums and symbols, and Harry’s brain was as fogged as though it had been filled with the fumes from Professor Trelawney’s fire.“I haven’t got a clue what this lot’s supposed to mean,” he said, staring down at a long list of calculations.“You know,” said Ron, whose hair was on end because of all the times he had run his fingers through it in frustration, “I think it’s back to the old Divination standby.”“What — make it up?”“Yeah,” said Ron, sweeping the jumble of scrawled notes off the table, dipping his pen into some ink, and starting to write.“Next Monday,” he said as he scribbled, “I am likely to develop a cough, owing to the unlucky conjunction of Mars and Jupiter.” He looked up at Harry.

J. K. Rowling

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

But before the surprise can develop into murmurings of disapproval, the doors to the gallery are thrown open.

Gregory Maguire

Confessions of an Ugly Step Sister

The fever of war that would presently clog vein and artery, deaden nerve and destroy brain, had still to develop.

H. G. Wells

The War of the Worlds

Frequently, in the course of a two or three days’ trip, in hot weather and without water, some hog would develop cholera, and die; and the rest would attack him before he had ceased kicking, and when the car was opened there would be nothing of him left but the bones.

Upton Sinclair

The Jungle

It is entirely possible that if a human brain were divided in a very young person, both hemi- spheres could as a result separately and indepen- dently develop mental functions of a high order at the level attained only in the left hemisphere of nor- mal individuals.

Dick, Philip K.

A Scanner Darkly

We opposite ones, however, who have opened our eye and conscience to the question how and where the plant “man” has hitherto grown most vigorously, believe that this has always taken place under the opposite conditions, that for this end the dangerousness of his situation had to be increased enormously, his inventive faculty and dissembling power (his “spirit”) had to develop into subtlety and daring under long oppression and compulsion, and his Will to Life had to be increased to the unconditioned Will to Power—we believe that severity, violence, slavery, danger in the street and in the heart, secrecy, stoicism, tempter’s art and devilry of every kind—that everything wicked, terrible, tyrannical, predatory, and serpentine in man, serves as well for the elevation of the human species as its opposite—we do not even say enough when we only say this much, and in any case we find ourselves here, both with our speech and our silence, at the other extreme of all modern ideology and gregarious desirability, as their antipodes perhaps?

Friedrich Nietzsche

Beyond Good and Evil

We cannot account how it is that an acorn, when put into the ground, is made to develop itself and become an oak.

Thomas Paine

The Age of Reason

“Most decidedly,” said he, “men are not equal, and I must beg my father to develop this theorem in the Chamber of Peers.”

Alexandre Dumas

The Count of Monte Cristo

Little by little he began to develop the expectation that this day something important, something decisive, was to happen to him.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Idiot

Is there not in every human soul, was there not in the soul of Jean Valjean in particular, a first spark, a divine element, incorruptible in this world, immortal in the other, which good can develop, fan, ignite, and make to glow with splendor, and which evil can never wholly extinguish?

Victor Hugo

Les Misérables

But it would have been more amusing, as a spectacle, if they had had the chance to develop, untrammelled, the full horror of their potentialities.

Aldous Huxley

Crome Yellow

A few minutes crawled by, and then everything happened at once in that confusing, overlapping, inconclusive way with which emergency situations seem to develop.

Stephen King

Insomnia

While the ambitious thought of my song is to help the forming of a great aggregate Nation, it is, perhaps, altogether through the forming of myriads of fully develop’d and enclosing individuals.

Walt Whitman

Leaves of Grass

Cut off from our common deep structures, we began to develop new languages that had nothing in common with each other.

Neal Stephenson

Snow Crash

She did develop a terrific hankering for a crucifix, though.

Vonnegut, Kurt

Slaughterhouse Five

But we're small, we're weak, and we don't develop nuclear weapons,” says Haymitch with a touch of sarcasm.

Suzanne Collins

Catching Fire

I was sent to these Arabs as a stranger, unable to think their thoughts or subscribe their beliefs, but charged by duty to lead them forward and to develop to the highest any movement of theirs profitable to England in her war.

T. E. Lawrence

Seven Pillars of Wisdom

The powerful want a “safe line of investigations,” which will develop only those products and ideas that can be controlled and, most important, that will allow the larger part of the benefits to be captured by inside investors.

Frank Herbert

Heretics of Dune

A plant or an animal has an order of developement peculiar to it, a bamboo will not develop evenly like a willow, nor a willow from joint to joint, and both have branches, that lessen and grow more light as they rise, and no characteristic of the soil can alter these things.

W. B. Yeats

Poetry

S’posing you could trot From Adelaide to the Pacific, For an afternoon’s run— Half what these gentlemen did— You would feel rather hot, But your legs would develop terrific— Yes, my importunate son, You’d be a Marvellous Kid!

Rudyard Kipling

Just So Stories

When you going to develop a sense of responsibility and get a raise?

Sinclair Lewis

Babbitt

It is as if a man, whose back was broken or nearly so and who was compelled to go bent, should find a branch backbone sprouting straight up from below the break and should gradually develop new arms and shoulders and head, while the old damaged portion of his body died.

John Muir

My First Summer in the Sierra

Mischief and Misinformation Committees are racing each other to develop a computer virus that will make automated bank tellers sick enough to vomit storms of ten- and twentydollar bills.

Palahniuk, Chuck

Fight Club

With the body definitely not being the self, and not the spectacle of the senses, so it also was not the thought, not the rational mind, not the learned wisdom, not the learned ability to draw conclusions and to develop previous thoughts in to new ones.

Hermann Hesse

Siddhartha

You don’t make sense.’ There were three members of the Action Board, the bloated colonel with the big fat mustache, Lieutenant Scheisskopf and Major Metcalf, who was trying to develop a steely gaze.

Heller, Joseph

Catch-22

It may be remarked, that the character of Thersites, revolting and contemptible as it is, serves admirably to develop the disposition of Ulysses in a new light, in which mere cunning is less prominent.

Homer

The Iliad

The next four sections, on division of labour, develop into the first three chapters of Book I of the Wealth of Nations.

Adam Smith

The Wealth of Nations