savvy

Meanings

1. 1
   adj

   Shrewd, well-informed and perceptive.

   That such a safe adaptation could come of The Hunger Games speaks more to the trilogy’s commercial ascent than the book’s actual content, which is audacious and savvy in its dark calculations.

2. 2
   verb

   To understand.

   He's probably a perfect technician as a surgeon, but he knows you get only what you grab. Think of the years it's taken me to learn what he savvied all the time!

Alteration of save, sabi (“to know”) (in English-based creoles and pidgins), from Portuguese sabe (“[she/he] knows”), from saber (“to know”), from Latin sapere (“to taste; to know”). First appears c. 1785 in a dictionary by Francis Grose, as a noun, “practical sense, intelligence”; also a verb, “to know, to understand”. The adjective is first recorded 1905, from the noun.

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