Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The ability to perceive stimuli.
- noun Mental or emotional responsiveness, especially in being offended or in having one's feelings hurt.
- noun The capacity to respond intelligently to refined emotions, especially in art.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun The state or property of being sensible or capable of sensation; capability of sensation.
- noun Mental receptivity or susceptibility in general.
- noun Specifically, the capacity of exercising or being the subject of emotion or feeling in a restricted sense; capacity for the higher or more refined feelings.
- noun In a still narrower sense, peculiar susceptibility of impression, pleasurable or painful; unusual delicacy or keenness of feeling; quick emotion or sympathy; sensitiveness: in this sense used frequently in the plural.
- noun The property, as in an instrument, of responding quickly to very slight changes of condition; delicacy; sensitiveness (the better word in this use).
- noun Sensation.
- noun Feeling; appreciation; sense; realization.
- noun Synonyms and Taste, Sensibility. See
taste .
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Physiol.) The quality or state of being sensible, or capable of sensation; capacity to feel or perceive.
- noun The capacity of emotion or feeling, as distinguished from the intellect and the will; peculiar susceptibility of impression, pleasurable or painful; delicacy of feeling; quick emotion or sympathy; ; -- often used in the plural.
- noun Experience of sensation; actual feeling.
- noun That quality of an instrument which makes it indicate very slight changes of condition; delicacy.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun The ability to
sense ,feel orperceive ; especially to be sensitive to thefeelings of another - noun An acute
awareness or feeling
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun (physiology) responsiveness to external stimuli; the faculty of sensation
- noun refined sensitivity to pleasurable or painful impressions
- noun mental responsiveness and awareness
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
Support
Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word sensibility.
Examples
-
These ocular spectra are of four kinds: 1st, Such as are owing to a less sensibility of a defined part of the retina; or _spectra from defect of sensibility. _ 2d, Such as are owing to a greater sensibility of a defined part of the retina; or _spectra from excess of sensibility_. 3d, Such as resemble their object in its colour as well as form; which may be termed
Zoonomia, Vol. I Or, the Laws of Organic Life Erasmus Darwin 1766
-
To qualify the term sensibility with any adjective inevitably means losing the denotation that sensible things can be the road to meaning.
-
To qualify the term sensibility with any adjective inevitably means losing the denotation that sensible things can be the road to meaning.
Archive 2007-11-01 Fred 2007
-
We apply the term sensibility to the receptivity of the mind for impressions, in so far as it is in some way affected; and, on the other hand, we call the faculty of spontaneously producing representations, or the spontaneity of cognition, understanding.
The Critique of Pure Reason Immanuel Kant 1764
-
And while Gary Groth may not be the cuddliest messenger in the world (on this or any other subject), one can rest assured that his sensibility is as curatorial as it [...]
Quote of the day 2010
-
"But if his sensibility is adolescent, it is in the best sense: his anarchic entertainments exist somewhere between Alfred Jarry and Terry and the Pirates."
-
I ask you, how do you expect a woman to keep up what you call her sensibility when this sort of thing has happened to her about three times a week ever since she was seventeen?
Overruled George Bernard Shaw 1903
-
The constant form of this receptivity, which we call sensibility, is a necessary condition of all relations in which objects can be intuited as existing without us, and when abstraction of these objects is made, is a pure intuition, to which we give the name of space.
The Critique of Pure Reason Immanuel Kant 1764
-
There may be an increasingly shared "sensibility" among "global" writers, but finally the way in which that sensibility is embodied in the available resources of the writer's medium -- the particular language in which he/she writes -- can't simply be ignored.
Translated Texts 2010
-
There may be an increasingly shared "sensibility" among "global" writers, but finally the way in which that sensibility is embodied in the available resources of the writer's medium -- the particular language in which he/she writes -- can't simply be ignored.
March 2010 2010
-
Instead, they're engaged in what the researchers call "information sensibility" — a "socially informed" practice that relies on "folk heuristics of credibility."
Google studied Gen Z. What they found is alarming. Adam Rogers 2024
brtom commented on the word sensibility
Madam, it is impossible for me to suspect a man of Mr. Snake’s sensibility and discernment.
Sheridan, School for Scandal
January 5, 2008