grok
Definition from Wiktionary, the free dictionary
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[edit] English
[edit] Etymology
Coined by Robert A. Heinlein in his novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) in which the word is described as being from the word for “to drink” and, figuratively, “to drink in all available aspects of reality”, “to become one with the observed” in Heinlein’s fictitious Martian language.
[edit] Pronunciation
[edit] Verb
grok (third-person singular simple present groks, present participle grokking, simple past and past participle grokked)
- (transitive, slang) To have an intuitive understanding of; to know (something) without having to think (such as knowing the number of objects in a collection without needing to count them: see subitize).
- (transitive, slang) To fully and completely understand something in all its details and intricacies.
- He groks Perl.
[edit] Usage notes
- Grok is used mainly by the geek subculture, though it was heavily used by the counterculture of the 1960s, as evidenced by its repeated appearance in Tom Wolfe's “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.”
[edit] Translations
to have an intuitive understanding
to fully understand
- The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables, removing any numbers. Numbers do not necessarily match those in definitions. See instructions at Help:How to check translations.
Translations to be checked
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[edit] See also
Grok on Wikipedia.Wikipedia- Heinlein Society
