understanding
/ˌʌndɚˈstændɪŋ/
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.82 in modern English
16
Scrabble Score
13
Letters
4
Syllables
10
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
The act of one that understands or comprehends; the mental process of discernment of meaning.
Uncountable
noun
Reason or intelligence; ability to grasp the full meaning of knowledge; ability to infer.
Countable
noun
An agreement of minds; harmony; something mutually understood or agreed upon.
Countable; Uncountable
noun
An agreement of minds; harmony; something mutually understood or agreed upon.
Countable; Uncountable
adj
Showing compassion, tolerance, and forbearance; sympathetically aware.
Example Sentences
- "There are certain things that defy human understanding."
- "The Ways of Heav’n are dark and intricate, Puzzled in Mazes, and perplext with Errors; Our Underſtanding traces ’em in vain, Loſt and bewilder’d in the fruitleſs Search; […]"
- "She has a solid understanding of particle physics."
- "It is the goneness of the Holocaust that produces the simultaneous profusion of discourses and understandings; the goneness is what opens up, what spurs, what unleashes the perpetual desire to do, to make, to rethink the Holocaust."
- "There is a multitude of theisms, many understandings of God, even within the same religious tradition."
- "The yawning gap in neuroscientists’ understanding of their topic is in the intermediate scale of the brain’s anatomy. Science has a passable knowledge of how individual nerve cells, known as neurons, work. It also knows which visible lobes and ganglia of the brain do what. But how the neurons are organised in these lobes and ganglia remains obscure."
Etymology
From Middle English understandinge, understondinge, from Old English understanding (“intelligence, understanding”), from Proto-West Germanic *undarstandingu, from Proto-Germanic *understandingō, equivalent to understand + -ing (gerund ending). Cognate with Middle Dutch onderstaninge, Middle Low German understandinge, Middle High German understandunge.
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: understandinge, understanding, *undarstandingu, *understandingō, understandyng, understandende
- Suffix: understand
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˌʌndɚˈstændɪŋ/
- British English: /ʌndəˈstandɪŋ/