old-fashioned, literary An intuition or premonition about something; a sense of foreknowledge about a situation, condition, or set of circumstances. A reference to a line in Shakespeare's Macbeth: "By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes." I have this pricking in my thumbs that the meeting isn't going to end in our favor. She felt the old, familiar pricking in her thumbs, a sense that something awful was about to happen to someone close to her.