insensate
English
WOTD – 19 October 2011
Etymology
From Latin īnsēnsātus.
Pronunciation
- IPA(key): /ɪnˈsɛn.sət/
Audio (UK) (file)
Adjective
insensate (comparative more insensate, superlative most insensate)
- Having no sensation or consciousness; unconscious; inanimate.
- 1816, Lord Byron, Diodati:
- Since thus divided — equal must it be
If the deep barrier be of earth, or sea;
It may be both — but one day end it must
In the dark union of insensate dust.
- 1928, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Moriturus:
- If I might be
Insensate matter
With sensate me
Sitting within,
Harking and prying,
I might begin
To dicker with dying.
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- Senseless; foolish; irrational.
- 1817 December 31 (indicated as 1818), [Walter Scott], Rob Roy. […], volume (please specify |volume=I, II, or III), Edinburgh: […] James Ballantyne and Co. for Archibald Constable and Co. […]; London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, OCLC 82790126:
- [T]he sot, the gambler, the bully, the jockey, the insensate fool, were a thousand times preferable to Rashleigh.
- 1854, Charles Dickens, chapter 13, in Hard Times. For These Times, London: Bradbury & Evans, […], OCLC 4389957:
- Stupidly dozing, or communing with her incapable self about nothing, she sat for a little while with her hands at her ears. . . . Finally, she laid her insensate grasp upon the bottle that had swift and certain death in it, and, before his eyes, pulled out the cork with her teeth.
- 1913, Joseph Conrad, “ch. 6”, in Chance:
- [T]he romping girl teased her . . . and was always trying to pick insensate quarrels with her about some "fellow" or other.
- 1918, Louis Joseph Vance, “ch. 12”, in The False Faces:
- But in his insensate passion for revenge upon one who had all but murdered him, he had forgotten all else but the moment's specious opportunity.
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- Unfeeling, heartless, cruel, insensitive.
- 1847, Anne Brontë, “ch. 36”, in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall:
- I was cold-hearted, hard, insensate.
- 1904, Frank Norris, “ch. 6”, in A Man's Woman:
- That insensate, bestial determination, iron-hearted, iron-strong, had beaten down opposition, had carried its point.
- 1917, Frank L. Packard, “ch. 8”, in The Adventures of Jimmie Dale:
- […] the most cold-blooded, callous murders and robberies, the work, on the face of it, of a well-organized band of thugs, brutal, insensate, little better than fiends.
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- (medicine, physiology) Not responsive to sensory stimuli.
- 1958 June, Edward B. Schlesinger, “Trigeminal Neuralgia”, in American Journal of Nursing, volume 58, number 6, page 854:
- If the ophthalmic branch is cut the patient must be told about the hazards of having an insensate cornea.
- 2004 Aug. 1, Jeff G. van Baal, “Surgical Treatment of the Infected Diabetic Foot”, in Clinical Infectious Diseases, volume 39, page S126:
- The presence of severe pain with a deep plantar foot infection in a diabetic patient is often the first alarming symptom, especially in a patient with a previously insensate foot.
- 2005 Feb. 5, “Minerva”, in BMJ: British Medical Journal, volume 330, number 7486, page . 316:
- The innocuous trauma of high pressure jets and bubble massage to the insensate breast and back areas had caused the bruising seen in the picture.
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Antonyms
- (having no sensation or consciousness): sentient
Translations
having no sensation or consciousness
|
senseless; foolish; irrational
|
unfeeling, heartless, cruel, insensitive
|
medicine, physiology: not responsive
|
Noun
insensate (plural insensates)
- One who is insensate.
- 1873, Thomas Hardy, “chapter 22”, in A Pair of Blue Eyes:
- Here, at any rate, hostility did not assume that slow and sickening form. It was a cosmic agency, active, lashing, eager for conquest: determination; not an insensate standing in the way.
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Verb
insensate (third-person singular simple present insensates, present participle insensating, simple past and past participle insensated)
- (rare) To render insensate; to deprive of sensation or consciousness.
- 1915, James Oliver Curwood, “ch. 24”, in God's Country And the Woman:
- And this thought, blinding them to all else, insensating them to all emotions but that of vengeance, was thought of Josephine.
- 2002, Shony A. Braun, My Heart Is a Violin, →ISBN, page 60:
- The train moved on again, keeping us prisoners in a stench-filled car, starving, suffocating, insensated.
-
References
- “insensate”, in The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989, →ISBN.
Anagrams
- antisense
Italian
Adjective
insensate f pl
- feminine plural of insensato
Noun
insensate f pl
- plural of insensata
Anagrams
- annessite, estensina
Latin
Adjective
īnsēnsāte
- vocative masculine singular of īnsēnsātus