apperceive
Americanverb (used with object)
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to have conscious perception of; comprehend.
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to comprehend (a new idea) by assimilation with the sum of one's previous knowledge and experience.
verb
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to be aware of perceiving
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psychol to comprehend by assimilating (a perception) to ideas already in the mind
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of apperceive
First recorded in 1250–1300; Middle English word from Old French word aperceivre. See ap- 1, perceive
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
They said they worshipped some angel, who appears to them as a Divine man, for he is resplendent with light; and that he instructs them and enables them to apperceive what they ought to do.
From Earths In Our Solar System Which Are Called Planets, and Earths In The Starry Heaven Their Inhabitants, And The Spirits And Angels There by Emanuel Swedenborg
People apperceive, think, and feel as these three teach them, and finally it becomes second nature to follow this line of least resistance, and to seek intellectual conformity.
From Criminal Psychology; a manual for judges, practitioners, and students by Hans Gustav Adolf Gross
When they were come, they instantly ran over the things that were in my memory, but, owing to their promptness, I was unable to apperceive what they observed.
From Earths In Our Solar System Which Are Called Planets, and Earths In The Starry Heaven Their Inhabitants, And The Spirits And Angels There by Emanuel Swedenborg
They stated the view with a rash emphasis, until one is forced to ask whether a mind which is originally nothing at all, can absorb, or as psychologists say, "apperceive" anything whatever.
From Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle by Henry Noel Brailsford
Thus, so long as the child is able to apperceive only the three sides and three angles of a triangle, his idea of triangle includes a synthesis of these.
From Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education by Ontario. Ministry of Education
It is sufficient for the type of individual who malingers to merely say the word, and the most fantastic creation of his fancy immediately becomes a reality and is apperceived by him as such.
From Studies in Forensic Psychiatry by Bernard Glueck
C. Adds to Clearness of Knowledge.—Not only does expression test the clearness of the apperceived new knowledge, but at the same time it gives the knowledge greater clearness.
From Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education by Ontario. Ministry of Education
The object is unideal, that is, the novel, external element is inharmonious with the revived and internal element by suggesting which the object has been apperceived.
From The Sense of Beauty Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory by George Santayana
The choice between them would be an arbitrary one, determined by personal bias, for the object being indeterminate, its elements can be apperceived as forming all kinds of unities.
From The Sense of Beauty Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory by George Santayana
In what opposite ways must the child's parents have apperceived the burning house and the engine respectively!
From Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals by William James
And this translation is not the result of an unusual, artificial attitude assumed for the sake of aesthetic appreciation; it is the natural mode of apperceiving force and mass.
From The Principles of Aesthetics by Dewitt H. Parker
But, if he goes to a house where there are round tables and still calls them tables, his apperceiving notion 'table' acquires immediately a wider inward content.
From Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals by William James
He has misunderstood because his mind was not prepared by making the proper apperceiving ideas explicit.
From Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education by Ontario. Ministry of Education
His experience and its interpretation are, then, inevitably conditioned by this apperceiving mass.
From The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day by Evelyn Underhill
The imagination works in conjunction with the apperceiving faculty and constructs real pictures.
From The Elements of General Method Based on the Principles of Herbart by Charles Alexander McMurry
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
