Showing results for "reasoning"

• present participle of reason.

reasoning

American  

[ree-zuh-ning, reez-ning] / ˈri zə nɪŋ, ˈriz nɪŋ /

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.

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reasoning British  

/ ˈriːzənɪŋ /

noun

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

2. the arguments, proofs, etc, so adduced

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Other Word Forms

• half-reasoning
  adjective
• nonreasoning
  adjective
• reasoningly
  adverb

Etymology

Origin of reasoning

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

Explanation

Reasoning is a logical, thoughtful way of thinking. When your teacher explains the reasoning behind his classroom rules, he makes it clear exactly why and how he came up with them. Voters often want to understand the reasoning behind certain laws, and toddlers almost always want to know the reasoning behind rules about bedtime and wearing warm clothes on cold days. You can also use reasoning as an adjective, to describe someone who can think logically. A reasoning adult can make decisions for herself. The word comes from reason, which is rooted in the Old French raisoner, "discuss or argue," and the Late Latin rationare, "to discourse."

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

reasoning

The reasoning was that if animals had already existed at the time, such an unusually well-preserved fossil deposit should have captured evidence of them.

From Science Daily ● Oct. 7, 2026

Beam is said to surpass other American open-weight models such as Thinking Machine’s Inkling and Nvidia’s Nemotron 3 Ultra across different agentic coding and reasoning benchmarks.

From MarketWatch ● Oct. 5, 2026

The two movements overlap heavily in membership and ideas, sharing an emphasis on reasoning through evidence and probabilities, and a conviction that preventing human extinction should be a top priority.

From Barron's ● Oct. 2, 2026

“As AI expands into reasoning, robotics, simulation and physical AI, the demands on compute infrastructure become more diverse,” AMD says in its announcement of the World Labs deal.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 29, 2026

Leibniz believed that the reform of mathematical symbols would improve reasoning just as effectively as the telescope had improved sight.

From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton

Related Words

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