intuition

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”).

noun

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 stand- ardised 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. … 1988, Andrew Radford, Transformational Grammar (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics), volume 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, →OCLC, page 4
2. A perceptive insight gained by the use of this faculty.