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gumption

noun
/ˈɡʌmpʃən/

Etymology

Borrowed from Scots gumption (“common sense, shrewdness; drive, initiative”); further etymology unknown, possibly connected with Middle English gome (“attention, heed”), from Old Norse gaumr (“attention, heed”), from Proto-Germanic *gaumō. English cognates include gaum (“to comprehend, understand”) and goam (“to recognize, see”).

  1. derived from *gaumō✻
  2. borrowed from gumption — “common sense, shrewdness; drive, initiative”

Definitions

  1. Common sense, initiative, resourcefulness.

    • Gumption, or rum gumption, docility, comprehenſion, capacity.
    • As a balance to genius, which is ideally creative, gumption is required to control, to direct. […] Gumption is the power to realize the poetical worth of common sense. Without that power no man was ever truly great.

  2. Boldness of enterprise

    Boldness of enterprise; aggressiveness or initiative.

  3. Energy of body and mind, enthusiasm.

    • A person filled with gumption doesn't sit around dissipating and stewing about things. He's at the front of the train of his own awareness, watching to see what's up the track and meeting it when it comes. That's gumption.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for gumption. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA