intuition

noun

Etymology: 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.

1. Immediate cognition without the use of conscious rational processes.

   “The native speaker's grammatical competence is reflected in two types of intuition which speakers have about their native language(s) — (i) intuitions about sentence well-formedness, and (ii) intuitions about sentence structure. The word intuition is used here in a technical sense which has become standardised in Linguistics: by saying that a native speaker has intuitions about the well-formedness and structure of sentences, all we are saying is that he has the ability to make judgments about whether a given sentence is well-formed or not, and about whether it has a particular structure or not. [...]”

2. A perceptive insight gained by the use of this faculty.