ingenuous - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
English
Adjective
ingenuous (comparative more ingenuous, superlative most ingenuous)
- Naive and trusting.
- Demonstrating childlike simplicity.
- ✤ “Do you mean to say you didn’t leave your wife for another woman?”
“Of course not.”
“On your word of honour?”
I don’t know why I asked for that. It was very ingenuous of me.1- Unsophisticated; clumsy or obvious.
- ✤ The apparent contradictions in his behaviour should therefore be discounted as ingenuous attempts to extricate himself from the consequences of an intellectual position which he once adopted but was never really his by intimate conviction.2
- ✤ […] Semitic agitation by stating ‘the truth’ in terms of facts and figures, the practice of self-criticism represented a well-intended but ingenuous effort to defend Jewry against anti-Semitism.3
- ✤ There was nothing more I dared say. My ingenuous attempts to lie my way out of trouble had only served to get me in deeper and deeper.4
- Unable to mask one’s feelings.
- Straightforward, candid, open, frank.
- ✤ [H]is Grace’s Man at his club, in company doubtless with other Men of equal social rank, talks over his master’s character and affairs with the ingenuous truthfulness which befits gentlemen who are met together in confidence.5
Etymology
Learned borrowing from Latin ingenuus (“of noble character, frank”). Doublet of ingenu.
Pronunciation
- (General American) IPA: /ɪnˈd͡ʒɛn.ju.əs/
- Audio (Southern England): 🔊
Printed 2026-09-04.
(echo:: @ ⌗)
Footnotes
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1919, W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, “ch. 12”, in The Moon and Sixpence, [New York, N.Y.]: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers […], →OCLC: ↩
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1965, New Left Review, page 86: ↩
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1978, G. Lebzelter, Political Anti-Semitism in England 1918–1939, page 150: ↩
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2012, Hester Rowan, The Linden Tree: ↩
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1848 November – 1850 December, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter 37, in The History of Pendennis. […], volume, London: Bradbury and Evans, […], published 1849–1850, →OCLC: ↩