intuition

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   an impression that something might be the case

   They had an intuition that something had gone wrong.

2. 2
   noun

   Immediate cognition without the use of conscious rational processes.

   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. [...]

3. 3
   noun

   instinctive knowing (without the use of rational processes)

4. 4
   noun

   A perceptive insight gained by the use of this faculty.

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.