Intuition
noun ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 Immediate cognition without the use of conscious rational processes. countable, uncountable
"The native speaker's grammatical competence is reflected in two types of intuition which speakers have about their native language(s) — (i) intuitions about sentence well-formedness, and (ii) intuitions about sentence structure. The word intuition is used here in a technical sense which has become standardised in Linguistics: by saying that a native speaker has intuitions about the well-formedness and structure of sentences, all we are saying is that he has the ability to make judgments about whether a given sentence is well-formed or not, and about whether it has a particular structure or not. [...]"
- 2 instinctive knowing (without the use of rational processes) wordnet
- 3 A perceptive insight gained by the use of this faculty. countable, uncountable
- 4 an impression that something might be the case wordnet
Example
More examples"Woman's intuition is clearly a valuable trait."
Etymology
From Middle French intuition, from Medieval Latin intuitiō (“a looking at, immediate cognition”), from Latin intueor (“to look at, consider”), from in- (“in, on”) + tueor (“to look, watch, guard, see, observe”). Equivalent to intuit + -ion.
Related phrases
More for "intuition"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.