Other forms: hunched, hunches, hunching
A hunch is a feeling that something is true when you have no evidence for it. The detective who searches the garage on a hunch, a hunch that the train will be late, a hunch about which of the two candidates will take the job.
You act on a hunch, follow a hunch, play a hunch, and you have a hunch that something is the case. It is not the same as a guess: a guess is a shot in the dark, while a hunch feels earned — the residue of things you noticed without meaning to. The verb is a different animal and entirely physical. To hunch is to pull your shoulders up and your back round, the way you sit over a laptop or walk into the wind; hence hunched over a desk, and hunchback, an old and unkind word for a person with a curved spine.
1nounhunchA feeling that something is true, formed without proof or reasoning.
“I had a hunch the shop would be shut, and I was right.”
synonyms: intuition, inkling, gut feeling
2verbraiseTo raise your shoulders and bend your back forward.
“He hunched over the notebook so nobody could read what he was writing.”
Also accepted in games: intuition
Nobody has pinned hunch down. It may be a reshaped form of hunk, or a relative of hump by way of a Middle English hunche. The mental sense has a tale attached to it: gamblers once believed that touching a hunchback's hump brought luck, so the player's lucky feeling became his hunch.
Proto-Indo-European
*ǵenh₁-
Proto-Indo-European
*ǵn̥h₁yom
Proto-Germanic
*kunją — race, generation, descent
Proto-West Germanic
*kuni
Old English
cynn — kind, sort, rank
Middle English
kyn
English
kin
English, today
hunch
Built from
Assibilated variant of hunk, of uncertain origin. Alternatively, a derivative of hump, via an earlier Middle English hunche, humpchin, from hump + -chin, -chen, equivalent to hump + -kin. In the sense of an intuitive impression, said to be from the old gambling superstition that it brings luck to touch the hump of a hunchback. kin comes from Middle English kyn, from Old English cynn (“kind, sort, rank”), from Proto-West Germanic kuni, from Proto-Germanic kunją (“race, generation, descent”), from Proto-Indo-European ǵn̥h₁yom, from ǵenh₁- (“to produce”). Cognate with Scots kin (“relatives, kinfolk”), frr kinn, kenn (“gender, race, family, kinship”), Dutch kunne (“gender, sex”), Middle Low German kunne (“gender, sex, race, family, lineage”), Danish køn (“gender, sex”), Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk kjønn (“gender, sex”), Swedish kön (“gender, sex”), Faroese and Icelandic kyn (“gender”), Finnish kunnia (“honour, glory”), izh kunnia (“reputation”), and through Indo-European, with Latin genus (“kind, sort, ancestry, birth”), Ancient Greek γένος (“kind, race”), Sanskrit जनस् (“kind, race”), Albanian dhen (“(herd of) small cattle”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA