a priori

Meanings

1. Self-evident, intuitively obvious.
2. Presumed without analysis.
3. Based on hypothesis and theory rather than experiment or empirical evidence.
4. Developed entirely from scratch, without deriving it from existing languages.

1. In a way based on theoretical deduction rather than empirical observation.

Etymology

First attested in 1610. Learned borrowing from Medieval Latin ā priōrī (“involving reasoning from cause to effect; from first principles”, literally “from the former”).