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perceive

verbattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//pəˈsiːv//
  • United States//pɚˈsiv//

To become aware of, through the physical senses, to see; to understand.

verb

  1. 1

    To become aware of, through the physical senses, to see; to understand.

    Go from the presence of a foolish man, when thou perceivest not in him the lips of knowledge.

    Morton was in fearful time pressure and at first did not realize he was mated. He snatched up his King and swung it around wildly, finally perceiving that there was no square for the critter,

    Then our first effort must be to identify the actual words. Only after recognizing them individually can we begin to try to understand them, to struggle with perceiving what they mean.

    Numerous experimental tests and other observations have been offered in favor of animal mind reading, and although many scientists are skeptical, others assert that humans are not the only species capable of representing what others do and don’t perceive and know.

  2. 2

    To interpret something in a particular way.

    John was perceived to be a coward by his comrades

Etymology

From Middle English perceyven, borrowed from Old French percevoir, perceveir, from Latin percipiō, past participle perceptus (“take hold of, obtain, receive, observe”), from per (“by, through”) + capiō (“to take”); see capable. Compare conceive, deceive, receive.

Forms

past tense
perceived
past participle
perceived
present participle
perceiving
third person singular
perceives
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).