Word.ws English Dictionary

counterintuitive

/ˌkaʊntəɹɪnˈtjuːɪtɪv/US/ˌkaʊntəɹɪnˈtuɪtɪv/

counterintuitive adjective: contrary to intuition or common sense.

Adjective

counterintuitive (comparative more counterintuitive, superlative most counterintuitive)

  1. Contrary to intuition or common sense.
    • With the students who worked on drafts in class, a number of aspects of lexicography proved challenging and counterintuitive.2015, James Lambert, “Lexicography as a teaching tool: A Hong Kong case study”, in Lan Li, Jamie McKeown, Liming Liu, editors, Dictionaries and corpora: Innovations in reference science. Proceedings...

Antonyms of counterintuitive

Forms of counterintuitive

comparativemore counterintuitive
superlativemost counterintuitive
alternative formcounter-intuitive

Origin of counterintuitive

From counter- + intuitive. Coined by Noam Chomsky in 1955 as “counter-intuitive”.

Words formed from counterintuitive

Questions about counterintuitive

What does counterintuitive mean?
Counterintuitive means contrary to intuition or common sense.
What part of speech is counterintuitive?
Counterintuitive is an adjective.
How do you pronounce counterintuitive?
Counterintuitive is pronounced /ˌkaʊntəɹɪnˈtuɪtɪv/ (US).

Words near counterintuitive in the dictionary

  1. counterintervention
  2. counterintrigue
  3. counterintrigues
  4. counterintuition
  5. counterintuitions
  6. counterintuitive
  7. counterintuitively
  8. counterintuitiveness
  9. counterintuitivities
  10. counterintuitivity
  11. counterinvade

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: counterintuitive (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-GB-counterintuitive.ogg.

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