comprehension

1 an ability to understand the meaning or importance of something (or the knowledge acquired as a result); "how you can do that is beyond my comprehension"; "he was famous for his comprehension of American literature" [ant: incomprehension]

2 the relation of comprising something; "he admired the inclusion of so many ideas in such a short work" [syn: inclusion]

English

Etymology

From compréhension.

Noun

1. thorough understanding
2. The totality of intensions, that is, attributes, characters, marks, properties, or qualities, that the object possesses, or else the totality of intensions that are pertinent to the context of a given discussion.
3. a compact syntax for generating a list in some functional programming languages

Synonyms

• understanding

Related terms

• comprehend
• comprehensibility
• comprehensible
• comprehensive
• comprehensiveness

Translations

• Czech: porozumění , pochopení , chápání
• Finnish: ymmärrys (1), käsityskyky (1)
• French: compréhension , entendement
• Ido: kompreno
• Japanese: 理解 (りかい)
• German: Verständnis , Verstehen
• Russian: понимание, понятие
• Slovene: razumevanje
• Turkish: anlayış
• Slovak: pochopenie, porozumenie
• Dutch: begrijpen

Comprehension has the following meanings:

• In general usage, and more specifically in reference to education and psychology, it has roughly the same meaning as understanding.
• Reading comprehension measures the understanding of a passage of text
• In logic, the comprehension of an object is the totality of intensions, that is, properties or qualities, that it possesses.
  • Related to this, in Anglicanism, comprehension (or comprehensiveness) refers to the theological inclusiveness and liturgical breadth thought to be integral to the definition of the tradition
  • In set theory, comprehension is another name for the axiom schema of specification (or more specifically, the axiom schema of unrestricted specification).
  • A related term in computer science, list comprehension, denotes an adaptation of mathematical set notation to represent infinite lists. Comprehensions are most closely associated with Haskell, but are available in other languages such as Python, Scheme and Common Lisp.

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