Copyright © Philip M. Parker, INSEAD. Terms of Use.
Definition: Instinct |
InstinctAdjective1. (followed by `with') deeply filled or permeated; "imbued with the spirit of the Reformation"; "words instinct with love". Noun1. Inborn pattern of behavior often responsive to specific stimuli: "the spawning instinct in salmon"; "altruistic instincts in social animals". Source: WordNet 1.7.1 Copyright © 2001 by Princeton University. All rights reserved. |
Date "instinct" was first used in popular English literature: sometime before 1321. (references) |
| Domain | Definition |
Literature | Instinct Something pricked or punctured into one. Distinguish is of the same root, and means to prick or puncture separately. Extinguish means to prick or puncture out. IL all cases the allusion is to marking by a puncture. At college the "markers" at the chapel doors still hold a pin in one hand, and prick with it the name of each "man" who enters. The word is used to express a natural impulse to do something; an inherent habit. "Although reason may ... be blended with instinct the distinction between the two is sufficiently precise. Reason only acts upon a defluite and often laboriously acquired knowledge of the relation between means and ends." - Romanes: Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. xiii. p. 157 (ninth edition). Source: Brewer's Dictionary. |
Medicine | An inherent tendency. Source: European Union. (references) |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |
(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)
Instinct is the word used to describe inherent dispositions towards particular actions. Instincts are generally an inherented pattern of responses or reactions to certain kinds of situations. In humans, they are most easily observed in responses to emotions. Instincts generally serve to set in motion mechanisms that evoke an organism to action. The particular actions performed may be influenced by learning, environments, and natural principles. Generally, instinct is not used to describe an existing condition or established state.
Examples can be observed in the behavior of animals, which perform various activities (sometimes complex) that are not based upon prior experience (such as reproduction and feeding by insects). Other examples include animal fighting, animal courtship behavior, and internal escape functions.
Some sociobiologists and ethologists have attempted to comprehend human and animal social behavior in terms of instincts. Psychoanalysts have stated that instinct refers to human motivational forces (such as sex and aggression). This use of the term has mainly been disregarded. The motivational forces among humans are now generally referred to as instinctual drives.
See also: Animal psychology, Ego, Superego and Id, Psychology, Ethology, Sociobiology, Reason, Unconscious mind, Culture theory
Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "Instinct."
Synonyms: InstinctSynonyms: imbued(p) (adj), instinct(p) (adj), inherent aptitude (n). (additional references) |
| Synonym by domain: drive-in (medicine). |
| Context | Synonyms within Context (source: adapted from Roget's Thesaurus). |
Absence or want of Intellect | Instinct, brute instinct, stimulus-response loop, conditioned response, instinctive reaction, Pavlovian response. |
Assent | Pressure to conform, herd instinct, peer pressure. |
Intellect | Noun: intellect, mind, understanding, reason, thinking principle; rationality; cogitative faculties, cognitive faculties, discursive faculties, reasoning faculties, intellectual faculties; faculties, senses, consciousness, observation, percipience, intelligence, intellection, intuition, association of ideas, instinct, conception, judgment, wits, parts, capacity, intellectuality, genius; brains, cognitive powers, intellectual powers; wit; ability; (skill); wisdom; Vernunft, Verstand. |
Motive | Induced; Verb: disposed; persuadable; (docile); spellbound; instinct with, smitten with, infatuated; inspired; Verb: by. |
Necessity | Noun: involuntariness; instinct, blind impulse; inborn proclivity, innate proclivity; native tendency, natural tendency; natural impulse, predetermination. |
Possession | Adjective: possessing; Verb: worth; possessed of, seized of, master of, in possession of; usucapient; endowed with, blest with, instinct with, fraught with, laden with, charged with. |
Reasoning, | Noun: intuition, instinct, association, hunch, gut feeling; presentiment, premonition; rule of thumb;Noun: intuition, instinct, association, hunch, gut feeling; presentiment, premonition; rule of thumb; superstition; astrology; faith (supposition). |
Sexuality | Sex instinct, sex drive, libido, lust, concupiscence;hots, horns; arousal, heat, rut, estrus, oestrus; tumescence; erection, hard-on, boner. |
| Source: adapted from Roget's Thesaurus. | |
Crosswords: Instinct |
| English words defined with "instinct": Alimentiveness ♦ cerebral ♦ felt ♦ herding, homing pigeon ♦ imbued, inherent aptitude, Instinction, instinctive, instinctively, Instinctivity, intellectual ♦ natural ♦ perceived ♦ sensed, social, sublimation, swarming. (references) |
| Specialty definitions using "instinct": Appetite ♦ Potable, psycho-analysis ♦ RELATIONS. (references) |
| Etymologies containing "instinct": Instinctivity. (references) |
| Non-English Usage: "Instinct" is also a word in the following languages with English translations in parentheses. Dutch (instinct), French (instinct), Romanian (instinct). |
| Domain | Usage | |
Screenplays | You don't need proof when you have instinct. (Reservoir Dogs; writing credit: Quentin Tarantino) Eating meat is an instinct! (Denis Leary: No Cure for Cancer; writing credit: Denis Leary) It's so weird Every time something like this happens, my first instinct is still to run to Angel (Buffy the Vampire Slayer; writing credit: Doreen Spicer) That's instinct. You can't teach that (Jackass: The Movie; writing credit: Jeff Tremaine; Spike Jonze) But a woman must decide purely on instinct, guesswork, if she wants to be considered nice (Design for Living; writing credit: Noel Coward; Ben Hecht) | |
Lyrics | But you're living on instinct (Wall Street Shuffle; performing artist: 10CC) Instinct leads me to another flow (U.N.I.T.Y.; performing artist: Queen Latifah) | |
Clever | Men always want to be a woman's first love. Women have a more subtle instinct; what they like to be is a man's last romance. (references; author: unknown) | |
Movie/TV Titles | The Hunting Instinct (1962) L' Instinct (1929) Paternal Instinct (1926) The Sporting Instinct (1922) L' Instinct est maître (1917) | |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | ||
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Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |||
| Author | Quotation |
Blaise Pascal | Two things control men's nature, instinct and experience. |
Edmund Burke | Passion for fame: a passion which is the instinct of all great souls. |
Elbert Hubbard | A person born with an instinct for poverty. |
Guillaume Apollinaire | To insist on purity is to baptize instinct, to humanize art, and to deify personality. |
Hector Hugh Munro | He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed. |
Hilaire Belloc | All men have an instinct for conflict: at least, all healthy men. |
Ralph Waldo Emerson | Trust instinct to the end, even though you can give no reason. |
Samuel Butler | To live is like to love-all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it. |
Tuckerman | The soul, by an instinct stronger than reason, ever associates beauty with truth. |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references. | |
| Title | Author | Quote |
Sylvie and Bruno Concluded | Carroll, Lewis | Reason and Instinct both tell me I ought to go home |
Scarlet Letter | Hawthorne, Nathaniel | It is not love, but instinct. |
Les Miserables | Hugo, Victor | 14. Some moments afterwards, the instinct of which we have already spoken made him turn his head |
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man | Joyce, James | Evil company on earth is so noxious that even the plants, as if by instinct, withdraw from the company of whatsoever is deadly or hurtful to them |
The Importance of Being Earnest | Oscar Wilde | Relations are simply a tedious pack of people who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die. |
Grapes of Wrath | Steinbeck, John | He went by instinct toward the other side of the stubble field, and at last he came to the road |
Walden | Thoreau, Henry David | It plays house, as well as horse, having an instinct for it. |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references. | ||
| Subject | Topic | Quote |
Lexicography | Devil's Dictionary | POTABLE, n. Suitable for drinking. Water is said to be potable; indeed, some declare it our natural beverage, although even they find it palatable only when suffering from the recurrent disorder known as thirst, for which it is a medicine. Upon nothing has so great and diligent ingenuity been brought to bear in all ages and in all countries, except the most uncivilized, as upon the invention of substitutes for water. To hold that this general aversion to that liquid has no basis in the preservative instinct of the race is to be unscientific -- and without science we are as the snakes and toads. |
Source: compiled by the editor from ICON Group International, Inc.; see credits. | ||
| Speaker | Phrase(s) |
Karl Lagerfeld | Whatever it is, it's up to me to make believe there is one. There was one, but this is something I'm not supposed to analyze, something I'm supposed to do. It's very different. I'm not a marketing person. I don't ask myself questions. I go by instinct. |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |
| Speaker | Term | Phrase(s) |
Richard Nixon | 1969-1974 | To leave office before my term is completed is opposed to every instinct in my body. |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references. | ||
| "Instinct" is generally used as a noun (singular) -- approximately 99.91% of the time. "Instinct" is used about 1,125 times out of a sample of 100 million words spoken or written in English. Its rank is based on over 700,000 words used in the English language. Some parts-of-speech are not covered due to the samples used by the British National Corpus. (note: percents less than one-hundredth of one percent have been omitted) |
| Parts of Speech | Percent | Usage per 100 Million Words | Rank in English |
| Noun (singular) | 99.91% | 1,124 | 6,783 |
| Adjective (general or positive) | 0.09% | 1 | 339,140 |
| Total | 100.00% | 1,125 | N/A |
Source: compiled by the editor from several corpora; see credits.
Expressions using "instinct": acquisitive instinct ♦ basic instinct ♦ brute instinct ♦ by instinct ♦ death instinct ♦ from instinct ♦ have an instinct for music ♦ herd instinct ♦ instinct with ♦ killer instinct ♦ migratory instinct ♦ mimicry instinct ♦ on instinct ♦ possessive instinct ♦ predaceous instinct ♦ predacious instinct ♦ primary instinct ♦ protective instinct ♦ reproductive instinct ♦ sex instinct. Additional references. | |
| Hyphenated Usage | |
Beginning with "instinct": instinct-driven, instinct-in, instinct-style. | |
Ending with "instinct": death-instinct, mother-instinct. | |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |
| The following statistics estimate the number of searches per day across the major English-language search engines as identified by various trade publications. Hyperlinks lead to commercial use of the expression at Amazon.com. |
| Language | Translations for "instinct"; alternative meanings/domain in parentheses. | |
Albanian | instinkt, i mbushur me, plot me (replete). (various references) | |
Arabic | مقدرة طبيعية, موهبة (aptitude, capability, endowment, facility, flair, genius, gift, knack, skill, talent, vocation), غريزة (sense). (various references) | |
Bulgarian | инстинкт (drive, impulse), интуиция (insight, intuition). (various references) | |
Chinese | 本能 , 天性. (various references) | |
Czech | instinkt, pud (drive, urge). (various references) | |
Danish | instinkt, trang (appetence, craving, drive, impetus, impulse, nisus, striving, urge), straeben (drive, impulse, urge), drift (conation, cultivation, drift, drive, drove, farming, impulse, management, Operation, revenue, urge). (various references) | |
Dutch | instinct (drive, impulse, urge), aandrift (access, impetus, impulse). (various references) | |
Esperanto | instinkto. (various references) | |
Farsi | هوش طبیعی جانوران , غریزه , شعورحیوانی . (various references) | |
Finnish | vaisto. (various references) | |
French | instinct. (various references) | |
German | Instinkt (feel), Trieb (access, coasted, desire, drive, impetus, impulse, impulsion, inclination, push, shoot, sprout, tided, urge, wreaked). (various references) | |
Greek | ένστικτο, ένστινκτο. (various references) | |
Hebrew | יצר (compose, create, creature, desire, impulse, inclination, lust, nature, urge), חוש טבעי (flair). (various references) | |
Hungarian | ösztön (horse sense, hunch, sixth sense). (various references) | |
Indonesian | naluri, garisah. (various references) | |
Italian | istinto (drive, impulse, urge). (various references) | |
Japanese Kanji | 直観 (hunch, insight, intuition), 直感 (hunch, insight, intuition), 人性 (human nature, humanism, humanity), 本能 , インスタント食" (incense, incentive, incentive sale, incest, insecurity, inside slider, insole, inspection, inspector, inspiration, install, installation, installer, installment, instant, instant foods, instep kick, institution, instruction, instructions, instructor, instrument panel, inter high school, inter seminar, intercept, interceptor, interchange, intercollegiate, intercourse, intercut, international, International Baccalaureat, internationalism, internetwork, internetworking, interoperability, interstate highway, interval, interval training, the Internet). (various references) | |
Japanese Katakana | ほ"のう, インスティンクト , じ"せい (benevolent rule, human nature, humanism, humanity, life, this world), ちょっか" (hunch, insight, intuition, personal admonition, remonstration, the emperor's censure). (various references) | |
Korean | 본능 (instinctive). (various references) | |
Manx | oalys (cognizance, science, spell), najoor (inwardness, nature), beoyn (aptness, drift, fate, liability, set, tendency, trend), baan. (various references) | |
Norwegian | instinkt. (various references) | |
Papiamen | instinto. (various references) | |
Pig Latin | instinctay.(various references) | |
Portuguese | instinto. (various references) | |
Romanian | instinct, înclinaţie înnãscutã. (various references) | |
Russian | инстинкт. (various references) | |
Serbo-Croatian | instinkt, prožet (impregnate, saturate), nagon (drive, urge). (various references) | |
Spanish | instinto (access, flair, impetus, impulse, urge). (various references) | |
Swedish | instinkt. (various references) | |
Turkish | içgüdü, yetenek (ability, accomplishment, accomplishments, aptitude, aptness, artistry, bent, caliber, calibre, capability, capacity, competence, competency, disposition, dower, dowry, efficiency, facility, faculty, fitness, flair, gift, hand, parts, power, prerogative, quality, skill, talent, vocation), sezgi (acumen, discernment, feel, feeling, flair, intuition, perception, sentience), kabiliyet (accomplishments, aptitude, aptness, capability, capacity, dower, faculty, flair, gift, prerogative, quality, skill, talent, vocation), dolu (abounding, abundant, alive with, capacity, crowded, engaged, filled, fraught, full, hail, instinct with, laden, loaded, occupied, replete, rife, shot, shot through, steeped in, thick with). (various references) | |
Ukrainian | інстинкт. (various references) | |
Vietnamese | năng khiếu t i khéo léo tự nhiên, bản năng thiên hướng, đầy (chock-full, compact, full, replete, teemful, teeming). (various references) | |
Welsh | greddf (intuition), anian (genius, nature, temperament). (various references) | |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various translation references. | ||
Derivations | |
Words beginning with "instinct": instinctive, instinctively, instincts, instinctual, instinctually. (additional references) | |
| |
"Instinct" is suggested in spellcheckers for the following: insinct, instinc, instint, isntinct. (additional references) | |
| Source: compiled by the editor, based on several corpora (additional references). | |
| # of Phoneme Matches | Pronunciation | Word(s) rhyming with "instinct" (pronounced i"nstingkt) |
| 3 | -ng k t | adjunct, banked, blanked, blinked, cranked, debunked, defunct, distinct, dunked, extinct, flanked, flunked, franked, hoodwinked, indistinct, interlinked, junked, linked, outflanked, plunked, precinct, ranked, sacrosanct, spanked, succinct, tanked, thanked, winked, yanked. |
Source: compiled by the editor (additional references); see credits. | ||
Scrabble® Enable2K-Verified Anagrams | |
| Words within the letters "c-i-i-n-n-s-t-t" | |
-2 letters: tincts. | |
-3 letters: intis, stint, tinct, tints, titis. | |
-4 letters: cist, inns, inti, nisi, nits, snit, tics, tins, tint, titi. | |
-5 letters: cis, inn, ins, its, nit, sic, sin, sit, tic, tin, tis. | |
| Words containing the letters "c-i-i-n-n-s-t-t" | |
+1 letter: incitants, instincts. | |
+2 letters: indistinct. | |
+3 letters: anticipants, contritions, distinction, extinctions, incitations, incitements, indictments, instinctive, instinctual, instructing, instruction, intinctions, intoxicants, nonartistic, nontheistic, scintillant, unstitching. | |
+4 letters: antagonistic, constipating, constipation, constituting, constitution, constricting, constriction, continuities, disinfectant, distinctions, distinctness, incantations, inconsistent, incrustation, indistinctly, instructions, interactions, intersecting, intersection, nonscientist, pectinations, wainscotting. | |
+5 letters: anthelmintics, anticipations, anticommunist, antidesiccant, antifrictions, antimechanist, antiobscenity, antiromantics, cantillations, cinquecentist, clandestinity, constipations, constitutions, constrictions, continuations, contortionist, contributions, discontenting, discontinuity, disinfectants, functionalist, immanentistic, inactivations, incrustations, indistinctive, indoctrinates, instinctively, instinctually, instructional, intellections, interceptions, interdictions, interjections, intersections, intoxications, intricateness, introductions, introjections, introspecting, introspection, nationalistic, necessitating, necessitation, noncapitalist, nonscientists, notifications, outdistancing, postinfection, postinjection, reindictments, scintillantly, scintillating, scintillation, transactinide, transcription, uncertainties, uninstructive, vaticinations, wainscottings. | |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. SCRABBLE® is a registered trademark. All intellectual property rights in and to the game are owned in the U.S.A and Canada by Hasbro Inc., and throughout the rest of the world by J.W. Spear & Sons Limited of Maidenhead, Berkshire, England, a subsidiary of Mattel Inc. Mattel and Spear are not affiliated with Hasbro. | |
| 1. Definition 2. Synonyms 3. Crosswords 4. Usage: Modern | 5. Usage: Commercial 6. Quotations: Familiar 7. Quotations: Fiction 8. Quotations: Non-fiction | 9. Quotations: Spoken 10. Quotations: Speeches 11. Usage Frequency 12. Expressions | 13. Expressions: Internet 14. Translations: Modern 15. Derivations 16. Rhymes | 17. Anagrams 18. Bibliography |
Copyright © Philip M. Parker, INSEAD. Terms of Use.
