Intuition

Pronunciation

• UK IPA: /ˌɪntjʊˈɪʃən/
• US IPA: /ɪntuwˈɪʃɨn/

Alternative forms

• intuïtion pedantic

Origin

From , from Medieval Latin intuitio ("a looking at, immediate cognition"), from Latin intueri ("to look at, consider"), from in ("in, on") + tueri ("to look, watch, guard, see, observe").

Full definition of intuition

Noun

1. Immediate cognition without the use of conscious rational processes.
• 1988, Andrew Radford, Transformational Grammar, 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 stand-
  ardised 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. A perceptive insight gained by the use of this faculty.

Derived terms