DISCERNING • FREE-TRANSLATOR.COM • Definition of Discerning

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/dɪsˈərnɪŋ/ Listen

verb

Discern v. t. (past & past part. discerned; pres. part. discerning)

To see and identify by noting a difference or differences; to note the distinctive character of; to discriminate; to distinguish. "To discern such buds as are fit to produce blossoms." "A counterfeit stone which thine eye can not discern from a right stone."

To see by the eye or by the understanding; to perceive and recognize; as, to discern a difference. "And (I) beheld among the simple ones, I discerned among the youths, a young man void of understanding." "Our unassisted sight... is not acute enough to discern the minute texture of visible objects." "I wake, and I discern the truth."

Synonyms: To perceive; distinguish; discover; penetrate; discriminate; espy; descry; detect. See Perceive.

Discern v. i.

To see or understand the difference; to make distinction; as, to discern between good and evil, truth and falsehood. "More than sixscore thousand that cannot discern between their right hand their left."

To make cognizance. (Obs.)

adjective

Discerning adj. Acute; shrewd; sagacious; sharp-sighted.

See images of 'Discerning'

Etymology of 'Discerning'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Discerning" Quotes from Famous Books

... Being of a discerning mind, she idled about the Platz till after nine, for it had been told to her that the great sleep rather late in the morning. What should she say to her serene highness? What kind of a curtsy should she make? These and a hundred other questions flitted through her head. At least she would wear ...

— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath

... in Paris was like that which any esthetic cult or pose may secure if diligently and ingeniously exploited. Mr. Hammerstein knew this and he had seen the work at the Opra Comique. It could not have escaped his discerning mind that only a small element in the population of even so cosmopolitan a city as New York could by any possibility possess the intellectual and esthetic qualifications necessary to enthusiastic appreciation of the qualities, not to say ...

— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... clear man. Very gentle, too, though full of fire; simple, brave, graceful. What he did, and what he said, came from him as light from a luminous body, and had thus always in it a high and rare merit, which any of the more discerning could ...

— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle

... in the hands of a true and trained pilot is as clear and as constant. In none of these conditions is there any difference between a nation and a boat's company. The only difference is in this, that the impossibility of discerning the effects of individual error and crime, or of counteracting them by individual effort, in the affairs of a great nation renders it tenfold more necessary than in a small society that direction by law should be sternly established. Assume that your ...

— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin

... falls, and not in the night, nor in the heat of the day. So it is not in the night of defection, nor in the heat of the day of persecution, when the Lord's people are multiplied, but it is in the morning of the day. Beloved, I wish you may be a discerning people, to know the Lord's seasons. Sall we be as those, of whom our Saviour complains, who can discern the face of the sky, but cannot discern the day of the Lord's merciful and gracious visitation towards them? Men indeed may be very learned and ...

— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various

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