sensation

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. A perception associated with stimulation of a sense organ or with a specific body condition: the sensation of heat; a visual sensation.
2. n. The faculty to feel or perceive; physical sensibility: The patient has very little sensation left in the right leg.
3. n. An indefinite generalized body feeling: a sensation of lightness.
4. n. A state of heightened interest or emotion: "The anticipation produced in me a sensation somewhat between bliss and fear” ( James Weldon Johnson).
5. n. A state of intense public interest and excitement: "The purser made a sensation as sailors like to do, by predicting a storm” ( Evelyn Waugh).
6. n. A cause of such interest and excitement. See Synonyms at wonder.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. The action, faculty, or immediate mental result of receiving a mental impression from any affection of the bodily organism; sensitive apprehension; corporeal feeling; any feeling; also, the elements of feeling or immediate consciousness and of consciousness of reaction in perception; the subjective element of perception. Sensation has to be distinguished from feeling on the one hand, and from perception on the other. All are abstractions, or objects segregated by the mind from their concomitants, but perception is less so and feeling more so than sensation. Sensation is feeling together with the direct consciousness of that feeling forcing itself upon us, so that it involves the essential element of the conception of an object; but sensation is considered apart from its union with associated sensations, by which a perception is built up. Sensations are either peripheral or visceral. Among the latter are to be specially mentioned sensations of operations in the brain. No approach to a satisfactory enumeration of the different kinds of sensations, even of the peripheral kind, has been made.
2. n. A state of interest or of feeling; especially, a state of excited interest or feeling.
3. n. That which produces sensation or excited interest or feeling: as, the greatest sensation of the day.
4. n. A hypothetical intensity of sensation which exists below the stimulus limen.
5. n. A sense-distance or sense-interval, traversed in the direction opposite to that which has been chosen as the positive Thus, if S_m and S_n are two points upon the scale of brightness qualities such that the distance S_m–S_n represents a just noticeable increase of brightness (positive), then the distance S_n–S_m may be considered negative in regard to S_m-S_n.
6. n. A sensation which lies to the right of the zero-point of the sensation-scale, that is, which belongs to the group of noticeable (as opposed to unnoticeable) sensations.
7. n. A sense-step or sense-distance regarded as traversed in the opposite direction to that taken as negative. Thus, if the sense-distance S_n-S_m be looked upon as negative, then the sense-distance S_m-S_n is positive.
8. n. Specifically, the sensations of dizziness furnished, in all probability, by the semicircular canals of the internal ear.

Wiktionary

1. n. A physical feeling or perception from something that comes into contact with the body; something sensed.
2. n. A widespread reaction of interest or excitement.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. (Physiol.) An impression, or the consciousness of an impression, made upon the central nervous organ, through the medium of a sensory or afferent nerve or one of the organs of sense; a feeling, or state of consciousness, whether agreeable or disagreeable, produced either by an external object (stimulus), or by some change in the internal state of the body.
2. n. A purely spiritual or psychical affection; agreeable or disagreeable feelings occasioned by objects that are not corporeal or material.
3. n. A state of excited interest or feeling, or that which causes it.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. a general feeling of excitement and heightened interest
2. n. someone who is dazzlingly skilled in any field
3. n. an unelaborated elementary awareness of stimulation
4. n. the faculty through which the external world is apprehended
5. n. a state of widespread public excitement and interest