Insight
Etymology
A native English compound of "in" and "sight," modeled in the Middle Ages partly on similar Germanic words, meaning literally "inner sight" or "seeing into." The metaphor is optical: insight is vision turned toward the interior of a thing, perceiving what surface observation misses.
noun · /IN-syt/
A sudden, deep understanding that reveals the true or hidden nature of something.
What it names
The click of comprehension — seeing into a problem's structure — as distinct from merely accumulating facts about it.
Example
Years of data gave him the facts, but the insight came in a shower: the problem wasn’t demand, it was timing.
Related idea
Insight is a grasp of a thing’s hidden structure, often arriving suddenly; intuition is a felt sense of what is true without knowing why — insight understands the mechanism, intuition merely senses the answer.