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1 Definition
Having or seeming to have an unusual insight into things not perceptible by the ordinary senses, or possessing an especially sharp and penetrating understanding of a situation.
2 In Use
Her clairvoyant read on the negotiation let her anticipate every objection before it was even raised.
3 Word Origin
clair Fr. · clear, bright → voyant Fr. · seeing → clairvoyant 19th c. English
Clairvoyant is a compound built directly from two French words joined together, clair meaning clear or bright, and voyant meaning seeing, itself from the Latin videre, to see. French speakers used the combined form to describe someone with unusually clear sight, whether literal or figurative. English borrowed the term wholesale in the nineteenth century, right as spiritualism and mesmerism were popularizing the idea of people who could perceive things hidden from ordinary eyes, and the word settled into English with that mystical shading intact.
💡Fun Fact
Clairvoyant surged into everyday English during the Victorian seance craze, when parlor mediums claimed the gift to justify their acts to paying audiences hungry for contact with the beyond. The word has since drifted well past the séance table, and today it gets applied just as often to a shrewd business forecaster or an uncannily accurate friend who always seems to call the ending of a movie ten minutes early. Its close cousin, clairaudient, describes the same supposed gift applied to hearing rather than sight, though it never caught on nearly as widely. Even skeptics tend to reach for clairvoyant as a compliment, a shorthand for insight so sharp it feels almost supernatural.
