sense

noun

• 1a faculty by which the body perceives an external stimulus; one of the faculties of sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch:the bear has a keen sense of smell that enables it to hunt at dusk

• 2a feeling that something is the case:she had the sense of being a political outsider
• an awareness or feeling that one is in a specified state:you can improve your general health and sense of well-being
• (sense of) a keen intuitive awareness of or sensitivity to the presence or importance of something:she had a fine sense of comic timing

• 3a sane and realistic attitude to situations and problems:he earned respect by the good sense he showed at meetings
• a reasonable or comprehensible rationale:I can’t see the sense in leaving all the work to you

• 4a way in which an expression or a situation can be interpreted; a meaning:it is not clear which sense of the word “characters” is intended in this passage

• 5chiefly Mathematics & Physics a property, e.g., direction of motion, distinguishing a pair of objects, quantities, effects, etc., that differ only in that each is the reverse of the other.
• [as modifier] Genetics relating to or denoting a coding sequence of nucleotides, complementary to an antisense sequence.

verb

• perceive by a sense or senses:with the first frost, they could sense a change in the days
• be aware of:she could sense her father’s anger rising
• [with clause] be aware that something is the case without being able to define exactly how one knows:he could sense that he wasn’t liked
• (of a machine or similar device) detect:an optical fiber senses a current flowing in a conductor