competence

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1. Fowler (1926) remarked that 'neither has any sense in which the other cannot be used', and noted that the first form is gaining ground. This assertion remains generally valid, and in the meantime competence has won out in the currency battle over competency. Competency has a stronger role as a countable noun in the sense 'a competent skill or feature', and is found in the plural, especially in American English:

Here they...write a monthly action plan and determine what skills and competencies will be required to achieve their goals—Apply Magazine, 2002.

2. Competence was given a special meaning in language learning by Noam Chomsky in 1962: competence for him means what a speaker of a language knows implicitly, as distinct from performance, which is what the same person actually uses in language production.

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Capacity of parties to an insurance contract to understand the meanings of their action in order for the contract to be valid.

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noun

1. Physical, mental, financial, or legal power to perform: ability, capability, capacity, competency, faculty, might. See ability/inability.
2. Conferred power: authority, faculty, mandate, right. Law competency. See ability/inability.

n

Definition: ability
Antonyms: inability, inadequacy, incapability, incompetence, inefficiency, ineptness

In hydrology, the largest size of particle that a river can carry. Just as the discharge of a river varies with climate, bed-floor roughness, and so on, so the competence of the river will vary with water depth and water surface slope. The very rough-and-ready sixth power law suggests that a doubling, for example, of river velocity would increase competence by 2⁶, i.e. by a factor of 64. See also hjulström curve.

competence, the term established by the American linguist Noam Chomsky to denote that unconscious store of linguistic knowledge which enables us to speak and understand our first language properly without having to think about it, permitting us to utter and comprehend sentences that we may never have heard before. Competence is what we know about the language we speak (without having to know that we know it), whereas performance is what we do with this knowledge in practice: that is, actual utterances. The distinction between competence and performance (similar to Saussure's distinction between langue and parole) is made in order to isolate the proper object of linguistics, which is to make the implicit rules of speakers' competence explicit in the form of grammar. The concept has been extended by theorists of communication, as ‘communicative competence’, and also adapted by some literary theorists who identify a ‘literary competence’ in experienced readers' implicit recognition of narrative structures and other literary conventions: a competent audience, for instance, will recognize the difference between the end of a scene and the end of the whole play, and so applaud at the right time.

1. Capacity to perform or teach a skill. See technical competency.

2. A basic psychological need to be able to succeed at optimally challenging tasks and achieve a desired outcome. See also self-determination theory.

1. the ability of a cell to take up a molecule of exogenously added DNA, and to be transformed by it (see transformation).
2. the ability of bacterial cells to incorporate phage DNA and to produce phage progeny (see bacteriophage).
3. the state of reactivity of a cell, tissue, or organism that allows it to respond to specific stimuli by forming new morphological structures or by synthesizing specific proteins (enzymes).

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n

A measure of the degree of a person’s ability to cope with all aspects of the environment.

For a list of words related to competence, see:

• Linguistics and Writing Systems - competence: unconscious internalized knowledge of the rules of a language enabling speaker to produce and understand the language

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See words rhyming with "competence."

  See crossword solutions for the clue Competence.

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Common misspelling(s) of competence

• competance

Dansk (Danish)
n. - kompetence, gode kår, kompetens

Nederlands (Dutch)
bekwaamheid, bevoegdheid, vermogen (geld)

Français (French)
n. - compétence, (Jur) compétence (pour faire), (Ling) compétence, revenu suffisant, aisance

Deutsch (German)
n. - Fähigkeit, Kompetenz, Zuständigkeit

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - ικανότητα, επάρκεια (προσόντων), επαρκής γνώση (γλώσσας κ.λπ.), αρμοδιότητα, σφαίρα αρμοδιότητας, (νομ.) ικανότητα δικαιοπραξίας

Italiano (Italian)
competenza

Português (Portuguese)
n. - competência (f)

Русский (Russian)
компетентность

Español (Spanish)
n. - competencia, aptitud, capacidad

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - kompetens, kompetens (språkv.), behörighet (jur.)

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
胜任, 能力, 资格

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 勝任, 能力, 資格

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 적성, 상당한 자산, 언어능력

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 能力, 権能, 権限, 資産

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) كفاءة, جدارة, أهليه‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮יכולת, כשרון, סמכות שיפוטית, הכנסה נוחה, כשרות, יעילות‬

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