Intelligente

Intelligente is an adjective in several Romance languages, most notably French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, that translates to “intelligent” in English. It denotes the capacity to acquire, understand, and apply knowledge and reasoning, as well as the ability to adapt to new situations, solve problems, and learn from experience. In linguistic usage, the term is applied to both animate beings, especially humans and certain animals, and, metaphorically, to systems, objects, or processes that exhibit complex, adaptive behavior.

The word derives from the Latin intelligere, a compound of inter‑ (“between”) and legere (“to choose, read, gather”). The original sense implied “to discern” or “to understand the relationship between things.” From Latin, it entered Old French as intelligent, later becoming intelligente in modern French and Italian, preserving the meaning of mental acuity and perceptiveness.

In philosophy, intelligibility refers to the quality of being comprehensible or coherent within a conceptual framework, while intelligentsia denotes a social class of intellectuals who influence cultural and political life. In contemporary discourse, “intelligente” is often employed in academic, technological, and educational contexts to describe cognitive performance, smart designs, or artificial intelligence systems that simulate aspects of human reasoning.

The adjective is inflected according to the grammatical gender and number of the noun it modifies (e.g., intelligente masculine singular in Italian, intelligentes plural in French). Its usage follows standard syntactic rules of the respective language, and it remains a common descriptor in both formal and colloquial speech.