sensing
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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.
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| Noun | 1. |  sensing - the perception that something has occurred or some state exists; "early detection can often lead to a cure"perception - the process of perceiving |
| 2. | sensing - becoming aware of something via the senses sensory activity - activity intended to achieve a particular sensory result looking, looking at, look - the act of directing the eyes toward something and perceiving it visually; "he went out to have a look"; "his look was fixed on her eyes"; "he gave it a good looking at"; "his camera does his looking for him" listening, hearing - the act of hearing attentively; "you can learn a lot by just listening"; "they make good music--you should give them a hearing" lipreading - perceiving what a person is saying by observing the movements of the lips |
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