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subconscious

adjectivenounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//sʌbˈkɒn.ʃəs//
  • United Kingdom//sʌbˈkɒn.t͡ʃəs//
  • United States//sʌbˈkɑn.ʃəs//

Occuring in the part of our mind that we are not normally aware of.

adjective

  1. 1

    Occuring in the part of our mind that we are not normally aware of.

    The sense of smell can be a subconscious influence on our actions.

    The “name-letter effect” refers to the subconscious bias that people have for the letters in their own name, and for their own initials in particular. They are more likely to choose careers, partners and brands that start with their initials (Joe becomes a joiner, marries Judy and loves Jaffa cakes).

Etymology

From sub- + conscious.

noun

  1. 1

    The part of the mind that we are not normally aware of.

    A person can sometimes wake up knowing the solution to a problem that their subconscious has been working on.

    At a recent meeting of the Organisation for Human Brain Mapping, held in Brighton, England, they explained how brain-scanning has revealed differences in the ways that traumatised and healthy brains respond to the world. This enables researchers to peer into the subconscious of traumatised patients.

Forms

plural
subconsciouses
comparative
more subconscious
superlative
most subconscious
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).