If someone is prescient, they see what is coming — or we say so after they turned out to be right. It is a formal, slightly bookish adjective. News and book reviews love it: a prescient warning, a prescient essay from ten years ago. Though actually, almost nobody says “I am prescient” about themselves. It is praise you give from the outside, often later, when the future has already arrived. It does not have to mean magic. A careful doctor, a good reporter, or a novelist can be called prescient. People stretch it for anyone who guessed well, which makes the word a little softer than the Latin suggests (foreknowing). In daily talk we still prefer “She called it” or “He saw it coming.”