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 which enables it to hunt at dusk

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

• 3 [mass noun] a 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. which differ only in that each is the reverse of the other: the cord does not become straight, but forms a length of helix in the opposite sense
• [as modifier] Genetics relating to or denoting a coding sequence of nucleotides, complementary to an antisense sequence.

verb

• 1perceive by a sense or senses:with the first frost, they could sense a change in the days
• be aware of (something) without being able to define exactly how one knows:she could sense her father’s anger rising [with clause]:he could sense that he wasn’t liked

• 2(of a machine or similar device) detect:an optical fibre senses a current flowing in a conductor