senses


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senses

faculties such as sight, hearing, taste, smell, or touch; sensations; feelings
Not to be confused with:
census – an official enumeration of the population
Abused, Confused, & Misused Words by Mary Embree Copyright © 2007, 2013 by Mary Embree

sense

 (sĕns)
n.
1.
a. Any of the faculties by which stimuli from outside or inside the body are received and felt, as the faculties of hearing, sight, smell, touch, taste, and equilibrium.
b. A perception or feeling produced by a stimulus; sensation: a sense of fatigue and hunger.
2. senses The faculties of sensation as means of providing physical gratification and pleasure.
3.
a. An intuitive or acquired perception or ability to estimate: a sense of diplomatic timing.
b. A capacity to appreciate or understand: a keen sense of humor.
c. A vague feeling or presentiment: a sense of impending doom.
d. Recognition or perception either through the senses or through the intellect; consciousness: has no sense of shame.
4.
a. Natural understanding or intelligence, especially in practical matters: The boy had sense and knew just what to do when he got lost.
b. often senses The normal ability to think or reason soundly: Have you taken leave of your senses?
c. Something sound or reasonable: There's no sense in waiting three hours.
5.
a. A meaning that is conveyed, as in speech or writing; signification: The sense of the criticism is that the proposal has certain risks.
b. One of the meanings of a word or phrase: The word set has many senses.
6.
a. Judgment; consensus: sounding out the sense of the electorate on capital punishment.
b. Intellectual interpretation, as of the significance of an event or the conclusions reached by a group: I came away from the meeting with the sense that we had resolved all outstanding issues.
tr.v. sensed, sens·ing, sens·es
1. To become aware of; perceive: organisms able to sense their surroundings.
2. To grasp; understand: sensed that the financial situation would improve.
3. To detect automatically: sense radioactivity.
adj.
Genetics Of or relating to the portion of the strand of double-stranded DNA that serves as a template for and is transcribed into RNA.

[Middle English, meaning, from Old French sens, from Latin sēnsus, the faculty of perceiving, from past participle of sentīre, to feel; see sent- in Indo-European roots.]
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
Translations
عَقْل، وَعْي، رَشْد، صَواب
smyslyvědomí
genvinde bevidsthedenkomme til fornuft
ép észöntudat
skynsemi
zmysly
akıldüşünme gücü

sense

(sens) noun
1. one of the five powers (hearing, taste, sight, smell, touch) by which a person or animal feels or notices.
2. a feeling. He has an exaggerated sense of his own importance.
3. an awareness of (something). a well-developed musical sense; She has no sense of humour.
4. good judgement. You can rely on him – he has plenty of sense.
5. a meaning (of a word).
6. something which is meaningful. Can you make sense of her letter?
verb
to feel, become aware of, or realize. He sensed that she disapproved.
ˈsenseless adjective
1. stunned or unconscious. The blow knocked him senseless.
2. foolish. What a senseless thing to do!
ˈsenselessly adverb
ˈsenselessness noun
ˈsenses noun plural
(usually with my, ~his, ~her etc) a person's normal, sane state of mind. He must have taken leave of his senses; When he came to his senses, he was lying in a hospital bed.
sixth sense
an ability to feel or realize something apparently not by means of any of the five senses. He couldn't hear or see anyone, but a sixth sense told him that he was being followed.
Kernerman English Multilingual Dictionary © 2006-2013 K Dictionaries Ltd.
References in classic literature ?
We must next explain the various senses in which the term 'opposite' is used.
Are they powerfully sensuous, that is do they appeal strongly to the physical senses, of sight (color, light, and movement), sound (including music), smell, taste, touch, and general physical sensation?
Accordingly, seeing that our senses sometimes deceive us, I was willing to suppose that there existed nothing really such as they presented to us; and because some men err in reasoning, and fall into paralogisms, even on the simplest matters of geometry, I, convinced that I was as open to error as any other, rejected as false all the reasonings I had hitherto taken for demonstrations; and finally, when I considered that the very same thoughts(presentations) which we experience when awake may also be experienced when we are asleep, while there is at that time not one of them true, I supposed that all the objects (presentations) that had ever entered into my mind when awake, had in them no more truth than the illusions of my dreams.
Sight and hearing are the most public of the senses; smell only a trifle less so; touch, again, a trifle less, since two people can only touch the same spot successively, not simultaneously.
In the course of their conversation they fell to discussing what they call State-craft and systems of government, correcting this abuse and condemning that, reforming one practice and abolishing another, each of the three setting up for a new legislator, a modern Lycurgus, or a brand-new Solon; and so completely did they remodel the State, that they seemed to have thrust it into a furnace and taken out something quite different from what they had put in; and on all the subjects they dealt with, Don Quixote spoke with such good sense that the pair of examiners were fully convinced that he was quite recovered and in his full senses.
Moreover it would be hardly honest in me not to balance these fine lyric words of Love and Friendship with words of coarser sound, and whilst my debt to my senses is real and constant, not to own it in passing.
(though this is what Socrates regards as a proof that a city is entirely one), for the word All is used in two senses; if it means each individual, what Socrates proposes will nearly take place; for each person will say, this is his own son, and his own wife, and his own property, and of everything else that may happen to belong to him, that it is his own.
You writers forget that what the senses furnish is not proof.
Ward supposes--that it has advanced, in more senses than one, beyond the point raised by Renan's Vie de Jesus.
I know that such a girl as Harriet is exactly what every man delights inwhat at once bewitches his senses and satisfies his judgment.
The body is a big sagacity, a plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a flock and a shepherd.
ALTHOUGH I am of opinion that there would be no real danger of the consequences which seem to be apprehended to the State governments from a power in the Union to control them in the levies of money, because I am persuaded that the sense of the people, the extreme hazard of provoking the resentments of the State governments, and a conviction of the utility and necessity of local administrations for local purposes, would be a complete barrier against the oppressive use of such a power; yet I am willing here to allow, in its full extent, the justness of the reasoning which requires that the individual States should possess an independent and uncontrollable authority to raise their own revenues for the supply of their own wants.