Word.ws English Dictionary

nous

UK/naʊs//nuːs/

nous noun: the mind or intellect, faculty for rationality or reason using the necessary common sense or awareness.

Noun

nous (uncountable)

  1. The mind or intellect, faculty for rationality or reason using the necessary common sense or awareness.
    • I feel the will to roam, to learn
      By test, experience, nous,
      That fire is hot and ocean deep,
      And wolves carnivorous.1900, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, On the Disastrous Spread of Aestheticism in all Classes
  2. The divine reason, regarded as first divine emanation.
  3. Common sense; practical intelligence.
    • to demonstrate nous
    • There is nothing original in absent-mindedness. True originality lies elsewhere. Really, the lower classes have no nous.1907 April, E[dward] M[organ] Forster, The Longest Journey, Edinburgh; London: William Blackwood and Sons, →OCLC, part I (Cambridge), page 13

nous meaning in Urdu, Bengali and Kannada

nous in Urdu

دماغ, فراست, ادراک

nous in Bengali

কাণ্ডজ্ঞান, বুদ্ধি, মেধা, ণত্বষত্বজ্ঞান

nous in Kannada

ವ್ಯವಹಾರ ಜ್ಞಾನ, ಮನಸ್ಸು, ಬುದ್ಧಿ

Forms of nous

alternative formnoos
alternative formnouse

Origin of nous

Borrowed from Ancient Greek νοῦς (noûs) or νόος (nóos, “mind”).

Words that rhyme with nous

10 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about nous

What does nous mean?
Nous means the mind or intellect, faculty for rationality or reason using the necessary common sense or awareness.
What is nous in Urdu?
Nous in Urdu is دماغ, فراست, ادراک. See Nous meaning in Urdu.
What part of speech is nous?
Nous is a noun.
How do you pronounce nous?
Nous is pronounced /naʊs/ (UK).

Words near nous in the dictionary

  1. noursles
  2. noursling
  3. Nouruz
  4. nouryshe
  5. nourysheth
  6. nous
  7. nouse
  8. nousle
  9. nousled
  10. nousles
  11. nousling

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: nous (page history and authors); nous (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); nous (Bengali Wiktionary) (page history and authors); nous (Kannada Wiktionary) (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-us-nous.ogg.

Cite this entry: “nous.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/nous. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.