prescient

[presh-uhnt, ‑ee-uhnt, pree-shuhnt, ‑shee-uhnt]

adjective

1. having prescience, or knowledge of things or events before they exist or happen; having foresight.

   The prescient economist was one of the few to see the financial collapse coming.

Other Word Forms

• presciently adverb
• nonprescient adjective
• nonpresciently adverb
• unprescient adjective
• unpresciently adverb

Word History and Origins

Origin of prescient¹

First recorded in 1590–1600; from Old French, from Latin praesciēns (stem praescient- ), present participle of praescīre “to know beforehand,” equivalent to prae- “before” + scīre “to know”; pre- ( def. ); science ( def. )

Example Sentences

I’ve been thinking a lot about your prescient book “American Midnight,” and the crackdown on civil rights and freedoms in the post-World War I years.

Read more on Salon

Waller has proven a prescient economist with intellectually coherent policy arguments.

Read more on The Wall Street Journal

This is the little-known but prescient speech that Saladin Ambar expertly parses and intriguingly reinterprets in “Murder on the Mississippi.”

Read more on The Wall Street Journal

Rather filed an unsuccessful $70 million lawsuit against the network, and in the years that followed, he delivered a series of prescient warnings about the chilling effects of political appeasement.

Read more on Salon

We’ve reached a point in history where many of the darker speculative assumptions about our collective future have become disconcertingly prescient.

Read more on Salon

Related Words

• farsighted