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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 the Appendix of Indo-European roots.] |
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