experience

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun The apprehension of an object, thought, or emotion through the senses or mind.
• noun Active participation in events or activities, leading to the accumulation of knowledge or skill.
• noun The knowledge or skill so derived.
• noun An event or a series of events participated in or lived through.
• noun The totality of such events in the past of an individual or group.
• transitive verb To participate in personally; undergo.

from The Century Dictionary.

• To learn by practical trial or proof; try or prove by use, by suffering, or by enjoyment; have happen to or befall one; acquire a perception of; undergo: as, we all experience pain, sorrow, and pleasure; we experience good and evil; we often experience a change of sentiments and views, or pleasurable or painful sensations.
• To practise or drill; exercise.
• noun The state or fact of having made trial or proof, or of having acquired knowledge, wisdom, skill, etc., by actual trial or observation; also, the knowledge so acquired; personal and practical acquaintance with anything; experimental cognition or perception: as, he knows what suffering is by long experience; experience teaches even fools.
• noun In philosophy, knowledge acquired through external or internal perception; also, the totality of the cognitions given by perception, taken in their connection; all that is perceived, understood, and remembered.
• noun Specifically That which has been learned, suffered, or done, considered as productive of practical judgment and skill; the sum of practical wisdom taught by all the events, vicissitudes, and observations of one's life, or by any particular class or division of them.
• noun An individual or particular instance of trial or observation.
• noun An experiment.
• noun A fixed mental impression or emotion; specifically, a guiding or controlling religious feeling, as at the time of conversion or resulting from subsequent influences.
• noun Synonyms Experience, Experiment, Observation. Experience is strictly that which befalls a man, or which he goes through, while experiment is that which one actively undertakes. Observation is looking on, without necessarily having any connection with the matter: it is one thing to know of a man's goodness or of the horrors of war by observation, and quite another to know of it or them by experience. To know of a man's goodness by experiment would be to have put it to actual and intentional test. Bee practice.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun obsolete Trial, as a test or experiment.
• noun The effect upon the judgment or feelings produced by any event, whether witnessed or participated in; personal and direct impressions as contrasted with description or fancies; personal acquaintance; actual enjoyment or suffering.
• noun An act of knowledge, one or more, by which single facts or general truths are ascertained; experimental or inductive knowledge; hence, implying skill, facility, or practical wisdom gained by personal knowledge, feeling or action.
• transitive verb To make practical acquaintance with; to try personally; to prove by use or trial; to have trial of; to have the lot or fortune of; to have befall one; to be affected by; to feel
• transitive verb To exercise; to train by practice.
• transitive verb (Theol.) to become a convert to the doctrines of Christianity; to yield to the power of religious truth.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun Event(s) of which one is cognizant.
• noun Activity which one has performed.
• noun Collection of events and/or activities from which an individual or group may gather knowledge, opinions, and skills.
• noun The knowledge thus gathered.
• verb transitive : To observe certain events; undergo a certain feeling or process; or perform certain actions that may alter one or contribute to one's knowledge, opinions, or skills.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• verb undergo
• verb go or live through
• verb undergo an emotional sensation or be in a particular state of mind
• verb have firsthand knowledge of states, situations, emotions, or sensations
• verb go through (mental or physical states or experiences)
• noun the accumulation of knowledge or skill that results from direct participation in events or activities
• noun an event as apprehended
• noun the content of direct observation or participation in an event