Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Having the power of perceiving, especially perceiving keenly and readily.
- n. One that perceives.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Perceiving; having the faculty of perception.
- n. One who or that which perceives, or has the faculty of perception.
- n. Specifically, one to whom the unexpressed thoughts of another (called the agent) are sought to be transferred in conducting telepathic experiments.
Wiktionary
- adj. Having the ability to perceive, especially to perceive quickly.
- adj. Perceiving events only in the moment, without reflection, as a very young child.
- n. One who perceives something.
- n. One who has perceived a paranormal event.
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. Having the faculty of perception; perceiving.
WordNet 3.0
- adj. characterized by ease and quickness in perceiving
- n. a person who becomes aware (of things or events) through the senses
Etymologies
- Latin percipiēns, percipient-, present participle of percipere, to perceive; see perceive.
Examples
“The percipient is usually a nasty divorce or child-custody battle.”
“This is the meaning of calling the percipient event our standpoint for perception.”
The Concept of Nature The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919
“(inaudible), and the percipient is a high-pressure flame issuing from”
“There is work to be done on the part of the percipient, as there is on the part of the artist.”
“The percipient who settles for contemplation is unable to experience art in quite this active way, but neither is the one driven by the sheer desire for beauty, who is willing to sacrifice the particularity of the work for the abstractly sensual, nor the "investigator," who, in his/her preference for "data" or illustration can only be impatient with the "uniqueness of the object perceived.”
“Signed "Emendator," its claim that the most dangerous errors "are those which make a kind of half sense," is both perceptive and percipient.”
“Paul, the oracle octopus whose prescient premonitions perfectly predicted the outcome of all six German World Cup games, first generated anger from Argentinian fans who believe his percipient pick doomed Argentina in the quarterfinals.”
“Surely, he is percipient enough to grasp how this compromise was going to play out with his base.”
The Huffington Post: Gordon Marino: President Obama: The Courage not to Fight
“The riddle of solipsistic perception prompted Bertrand Russell to explain, Perception is marvelous, because it cannot be conceived as an action of the object on the percipient, since substances never interact.”
“A few percipient souls recognised sooner than the rest of us that the great economic miracle of which Blair and Gordon Brown once boasted was really an asset-and-credit bubble which one day must burst.”
The Guardian: My generation squandered our golden opportunity | Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘percipient’.
-
cicatrix
scar tissue
minatory, naira, Cluniac, embracive, prolix, hierophant, timorous, adduce, veracious, dysphoric, sang-froid, vitiate and 414 more...
chained_bear "...although he was wary, percipient, and acute enough to have survived several campaigns in which many of his colleagues had died, some under torture, he was by no means omniscient..."
--Patrick O'Brian, The Far Side of the World, 34–35 Feb 19, 2008