conscious

Etymology

Late 16th century in the sense of "aware of wrongdoing".https://web.archive.org/web/20220714064352/https://www.lexico.com/definition/conscious From Latin cōnscius (“conscious, conscious of guilt”), itself from con- (a form of com- (“together”)) + scīre (“to know”) + -us.

adj

1. Alert, awake; with one's mental faculties active.
   The noise woke me, but it was another few minutes before I was fully conscious.
2. Aware of one's own existence; aware of one's own awareness.
   The best indicator of your level of consciousness is how you deal with life's challenges when they come. Through those challenges, an already unconscious person tends to become more deeply unconscious, and a conscious person more intensely conscious. 1999, Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, Hodder and Stoughton, pages 61–62
   Only highly intelligent beings can be fully conscious.
3. Aware of, sensitive to; observing and noticing, or being strongly interested in or concerned about.
   Furthermore, the military operator is far less conscious of budgetary constraints than is the civilian consumer. 1955, Arthur Smithies, The Budgetary Process in the United States, page 290
   I was conscious of a noise behind me. a very class-conscious analysis
4. Deliberate, intentional, done with awareness of what one is doing.
   He candidly confesses that it is an effort to account for Joseph Smith upon some other hypothesis than that he was a conscious fraud, bent on deceiving mankind. 1907, Brigham Henry Roberts, Defense of the Faith and the Saints, volume 1, page 43
   Start fresh, try and learn from past mistakes, make a conscious effort to be a better person. 2015, Jamie Kornegay, Soil: A Novel, page 214
5. Known or felt personally, internally by a person.
   conscious guilt
6. (rare) Self-conscious, or aware of wrongdoing, feeling guilty.
   c. 1634, John Dryden (translator), Richard Crashaw, Epigrammatum sacrorum liber The conscious water saw its God, and blushed.

noun

1. The part of the mind that is aware of itself; the consciousness.