use-icon

HOW TO USE THE DICTIONARY

To look up an entry in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, use the search window above. For best results, after typing in the word, click on the “Search” button instead of using the “enter” key.

Some compound words (like bus rapid transit, dog whistle, or identity theft) don’t appear on the drop-down list when you type them in the search bar. For best results with compound words, place a quotation mark before the compound word in the search window.

guide to the dictionary

use-icon

THE USAGE PANEL

The Usage Panel is a group of nearly 200 prominent scholars, creative writers, journalists, diplomats, and others in occupations requiring mastery of language. Annual surveys have gauged the acceptability of particular usages and grammatical constructions.

The Panelists

open-icon

AMERICAN HERITAGE DICTIONARY APP

The new American Heritage Dictionary app is now available for iOS and Android.

scroll-icon

THE AMERICAN HERITAGE DICTIONARY BLOG

The articles in our blog examine new words, revised definitions, interesting images from the fifth edition, discussions of usage, and more.

100-words-icon

See word lists from the best-selling 100 Words Series!

Find out more!

open-icon

INTERESTED IN DICTIONARIES?

Check out the Dictionary Society of North America at http://www.dictionarysociety.com

in·tu·it (ĭn-tĭt, -ty-)
Share:
tr.v. in·tu·it·ed, in·tu·it·ing, in·tu·its
To know or understand by intuition: "The child bore his infirmity bravely ... yet may have intuited that his days were numbered" (Virginia Spencer Carr).

[Back-formation from INTUITION.]

Usage Note: Intuit is a good example of a verb that was once considered objectionable but has since become so familiar as to be unremarkable. In our 1988 survey, only 34 percent of the Usage Panel accepted it in Dermot often intuits my feelings about things long before I am really aware of them myself. This weakness of acceptance has been attributed to the verb's status as a back-formation from intuition, since back-formations like incent and surveil are often viewed as trendy or jargony. As a verb, intuit has been in existence as long as other back-formations, such as diagnose (from diagnosis), that have worked their way into the standard vocabulary. Although resistance to intuit lasted longer than that of many back-formation verbs, the word has shaken off its stigma. In our 2005 survey, 80 percent of the Panel accepted the sentence that had made so many Panelists uneasy 17 years before.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition copyright ©2022 by HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.
 

Indo-European & Semitic Roots Appendices

    Thousands of entries in the dictionary include etymologies that trace their origins back to reconstructed proto-languages. You can obtain more information about these forms in our online appendices:

    Indo-European Roots

    Semitic Roots

    The Indo-European appendix covers nearly half of the Indo-European roots that have left their mark on English words. A more complete treatment of Indo-European roots and the English words derived from them is available in our Dictionary of Indo-European Roots.