reasoning

[ree-zuh-ning, reez-ning]

noun

1. the act or process of a person who reasons.

2. the process of forming conclusions, judgments, or inferences from facts or premises.

3. the reasons, arguments, proofs, etc., resulting from this process.

reasoning

/ ˈriːzənɪŋ /

noun

1. the act or process of drawing conclusions from facts, evidence, etc

2. the arguments, proofs, etc, so adduced

Other Word Forms

• reasoningly adverb
• half-reasoning adjective
• nonreasoning adjective

Word History and Origins

Origin of reasoning¹

First recorded in 1325–75, reasoning is from the Middle English word resoninge. See reason, -ing ²

Example Sentences

And they wanted to improve its capacity for thought and reasoning in the interest of building a better personal assistant in coding and other tasks.

Read more on The Wall Street Journal

The widening gap between rules-based prescriptions and current policy has amplified calls for the Fed to explain its reasoning more clearly.

Read more on Barron's

AI reasoning models—including DeepSeek — consume vastly more computing capacity for inference, the process of generating answers from already developed AI models.

Read more on Barron's

Google’s Gemini 3 launch on Tuesday showed investors that it’s quickly catching up to OpenAI, as Google’s newest model outperformed the latest version of ChatGPT on several key reasoning and intelligence measures.

Read more on MarketWatch

The company also released Google Antigravity, a new agentic development platform for software engineers, and introduced Gemini Deep Think, an enhanced reasoning model that will become available to premium users.

Read more on MarketWatch

Related Words

• acumen 
• analysis 
• argument 
• hypothesis 
• inference 
• interpretation 
• premise 
• proposition 
• rationale 
• thinking