intrinsic

Pluralintrinsics

1. 1
   essentialadjective

   Belonging to the essential nature of something and inseparable from it, rather than coming from outside.

   A gold coin has intrinsic value, while a paper bill is worth only what people agree it is worth.

   She believes every person has intrinsic worth, regardless of what they achieve.

   Similarinherent, essential, innate, natural, native

   Oppositeextrinsic

   Note

   Latin intrīnsecus meant “on the inside, inwardly”, and the word keeps that picture: an intrinsic quality sits inside the thing rather than being laid on from outside, which makes extrinsic its natural opposite. It pairs readily with value, worth and merit, from the intrinsic value of gold to Isaac Taylor's “intrinsic value of Grecian philosophy” in Saturday Evening (1832).

2. 2
   inside body partadjective

   Of a body part, located, produced, or secreted within an organ, tissue, muscle, or limb, or originating inside it.

   The intrinsic muscles of the larynx adjust the tension of the vocal cords.

   The stomach lining secretes intrinsic factor, which the body needs to absorb vitamin B12.

   Similarinternal

   Oppositeextrinsic

   Note

   Anatomists set intrinsic against extrinsic. The intrinsic muscles of the hand begin and end within it and handle fine finger work, while the extrinsic ones sit in the forearm and reach the fingers through long tendons; the tongue, the eye and the larynx are divided the same way.

3. 3
   built into languageadjective

   Of a function or operator in a programming language, built into the language rather than defined by the programmer.

   Fortran's intrinsic functions include SQRT and ABS, so you never have to write them yourself.

   The compiler rejected my function name because it clashed with an intrinsic procedure.

   Similarbuilt-in

   Note

   In Fortran the word is official: the language standard lists its intrinsic procedures and operators, and anything else has to be written by the programmer or brought in from a module. Other languages more often say built-in, though compiler writers keep the noun for functions the compiler supplies itself.

4. 4
   compiler shortcutnouncountable

   A built-in function that the compiler implements directly, without going through a call to a library.

   She rewrote the inner loop with SIMD intrinsics and cut its run time in half.

   This intrinsic compiles to a single processor instruction, so there is no function-call overhead.

   Note

   Intrinsics let a programmer reach a processor's special instructions, such as vector or SIMD operations, from ordinary source code without writing assembly. Robert Robey and Yuliana Zamora's Parallel and High Performance Computing (2021) turns to vector intrinsics for loops that will not vectorize even with hints. The price is portability: an intrinsic tied to one chip family will not help on another.

5. 5
   video gamesnouncountable

   In video games, an ability that belongs to a character itself and needs no outside equipment.

   Drinking from the strange fountain gave my rogue the telepathy intrinsic.

   By the end of the run, my character had collected half a dozen intrinsics, including speed and poison resistance.

   Note

   Players set an intrinsic against powers that come from gear: a ring or cloak works only while it is worn, but an intrinsic stays with the character after every item is gone. One can be gained by eating something unusual, as when dragon meat brings resistance to fire, and the plural intrinsics is common once a character collects several.

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