understanding

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. The quality or condition of one who understands; comprehension.
2. n. The faculty by which one understands; intelligence. See Synonyms at reason.
3. n. Individual or specified judgment or outlook; opinion.
4. n. A compact implicit between two or more people or groups.
5. n. The matter implicit in such a compact.
6. n. A reconciliation of differences; a state of agreement: They finally reached an understanding.
7. n. A disposition to appreciate or share the feelings and thoughts of others; sympathy.
8. adj. Characterized by or having comprehension, good sense, or discernment.
9. adj. Compassionate; sympathetic.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. The act of one who understands or comprehends; comprehension; apprehension and appreciation; discernment.
2. n. The knowing power, in general; intelligence; wit. The old psychologists divided the faculties of the mind into understanding, or cognitive power, and will.
3. n. The representative faculty; the power of abstract thought; the logical power. Kantian writers restrict understanding to the operation of abstractive thought concerning objects of possible experience.
4. n. Intelligence between two or more persons; agreement of minds; harmony; union of sentiment; also, something mutually understood or agreed upon: as, there was an understanding between them.
5. Knowing; skilful; intelligent; possessed of or exhibiting good sense.

Wiktionary

1. n. uncountable Mental, sometimes emotional process of comprehension, assimilation of knowledge, which is subjective by its nature.
2. n. countable Reason or intelligence, ability to grasp the full meaning of knowledge, ability to infer.
3. n. countable Opinion, judgement or outlook.
4. n. countable An informal contract, mutual agreement.
5. n. countable A reconciliation of differences.
6. n. uncountable Sympathy.
7. n. All that people individually sense and feel of themselves.
8. adj. Showing compassion.
9. v. present participle of understand.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. adj. Knowing; intelligent; skillful.
2. n. The act of one who understands a thing, in any sense of the verb; knowledge; discernment; comprehension; interpretation; explanation.
3. n. An agreement of opinion or feeling; adjustment of differences; harmony; anything mutually understood or agreed upon.
4. n. The power to understand; the intellectual faculty; the intelligence; the rational powers collectively conceived an designated; the higher capacities of the intellect; the power to distinguish truth from falsehood, and to adapt means to ends.
5. n. Specifically, the discursive faculty; the faculty of knowing by the medium or use of general conceptions or relations. In this sense it is contrasted with, and distinguished from, the reason.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. an inclination to support or be loyal to or to agree with an opinion
2. n. the capacity for rational thought or inference or discrimination
3. adj. characterized by understanding based on comprehension and discernment and empathy
4. n. the statement (oral or written) of an exchange of promises
5. n. the cognitive condition of someone who understands