Other forms: intuitions, intuitive, intuitively
Intuition is knowing without being able to show your working. You meet somebody and something in you says no, long before you could explain what.
It is not magic and it is not guessing — it is usually experience that has sunk below the level you can talk about, which is why experienced people have better intuition than beginners. The adjective is intuitive, and it does double duty: an intuitive person trusts their gut, while an intuitive design is one you can use without being told how. Note the phrase against my better intuition is wrong; the fixed phrase is against my better judgement.
1nounintuitionKnowing something immediately, without reasoning it out.~93%
“Her intuition told her the house was wrong before she saw the damp.”
synonyms: instinct, gut feeling
2nounparticularA particular thing known that way.~7%
“He had an intuition that the train would be cancelled, and it was.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 96 sentences found in the wild and placed 60 of them on a sense (36 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: gut feeling
in-TUITION → the TUITION already IN you
An empty classroom with your name on the register and the tuition already paid. You never sat a single lesson, and you know the answer anyway.
hooks ontotuition
Latin in, in, and tueri, to look. Intuition is looking inward — the answer is found by looking in rather than by working out.
Latin
intueor — to look at, consider
Medieval Latin
intuitiō — a looking at, immediate cognition
Middle French
intuition
English, today
intuition
Built from
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.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA