to conceive: to become pregnant, the very start of carrying a child
This is the verb for the very beginning of a new life, the moment a child is set in motion inside the mother. It never names the delivery itself; a different word, to bear a child (יָלַד), carries that. The Bible pairs the two again and again in the steady refrain "she conceived and bore," which fixes this word at the front of the sequence: first conceiving, then carrying, then bearing.
In the birth stories that refrain is almost never neutral. It marks the turning points of a family line, and its small variations carry weight: Hagar conceives long before she bears, leaving room for an encounter with God in between; Lot's daughters conceive by their own father; the childless mothers of the great families hinge on whether a woman conceives at all. Behind nearly every "she conceived" the writers assume that conceiving is finally God's gift, not something people simply accomplish.
From that concrete core the word stretches into a vivid picture. Just as a woman conceives and then brings forth a child, a person can be said to conceive trouble within and then bring it forth as a deed. Poets and prophets reach for this image to show that evil is not an accident but something deliberately set in motion and carried inside before it is ever born into the world. The same picture can be turned toward failure: a nation strains as if in labor and gives birth only to wind, all its effort coming to nothing.