insee
insee verb: to see into; to observe acutely.
Verb
insee (third-person singular simple present insees, present participle inseeing, simple past insaw, past participle inseen)
- To see into; to observe acutely.
- First, moving from his internal region outwards to other internal regions, the speaker insees the "tear inside the stone."1992, Victoria Harris, The incorporative consciousness of Robert Bly
- To have or gain insight into; to empathise with or come to fully understand one's point of view.
- This process of intuitional knowledge is strikingly analogous to the process of inseeing (Einsehen) Rilke described in his letters. I love inseeing. Can you imagine with me how glorious it is to insee...1990, Sandra Gilbert, Acts of attention: the poems of D.H. Lawrence
- To inspect.
Forms of insee
| third-person singular present | insees |
|---|---|
| present participle | inseeing |
| past | insaw |
| past participle | inseen |
Origin of insee
From in- + see, or taken as a back-formation of inseeing, itself a loan-translation / calque of German Einsehen (“recognition, observation”). Compare Old English onsēon (“to look on, observe, regard, take notice of”). More at insight.
Questions about insee
- What does insee mean?
- Insee means to see into; to observe acutely.
- What part of speech is insee?
- Insee is a verb.
- What is the past tense of insee?
- The past tense of insee is insaw.
Words near insee in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: insee (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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Cite this entry: “insee.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/insee. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.