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''insouciant'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20250714005530-00-⌔

insouciant - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Adjective

insouciant (comparative more insouciant, superlative most insouciant)

  • Casually unconcerned; carefree, indifferent, nonchalant.
    • ✤ Synonyms: blasé, uninterested; see also Thesaurus: apathetic, Thesaurus: carefree
    • ✤ an insouciant gesture
    • ✤ “I am quite serious in saying that your loss must and would be felt; but I verily believe,” added she, after a moment’s hesitation, “that you are so insouciant yourself, that you cannot believe that every body else is not equally indifferent.”1
    • ✤ It was there [Cadiz, Spain] that on Sunday I had seen the populace disport itself, and it was full of life then, gay and insouciant.2
    • ✤ When we left the Marr house, he[Peter] had boldly said to Felicity, “May I see you home?” And Felicity, much to our amazement, had taken his arm and marched off with him. […] As for me, I was consumed by a secret and burning desire to ask the Story Girl if I might see her home; but I could not screw my courage to the sticking point. How I envied Peter his easy, insouciant manner!3
    • ✤ […] [Jack] Nicholson turned to an assistant, bummed a cigarette, flashed one of his wolfish, insouciant grins and said, “We all have our little secrets, Seany.”4
    • ✤ As a fashion editor, I pay obsessive attention to my appearance. Even when I pretend to look insouciant, each look has been painfully considered. The right earrings, coordinating shoes, the careful symmetry of a well-balanced look — these are things that please me. The gym has crushed my sartorial ambitions.5

Etymology

From French insouciant, from in- (“not”, prefix) + souciant (“worrying”), 1828.6

Pronunciation

  • (Received Pronunciation) IPA: /ɪnˈsuːsɪənt/
  • (General American) IPA: /inˈsusiənt/
  • Audio (General American): 🔊
  • Hyphenation: in‧sou‧ciant

Printed 2026-06-28.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

  1. 1834, [Theresa Lewis], chapter XII, in Countess of Morley [Frances Talbot Parker], editor, Dacre: A Novel. […] In Three Volumes, volume II, London: Printed for Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, & Longman, […], →OCLC, page 220: ↩

  2. 1905, William Somerset Maugham, chapter XXXVIII, in The Land of the Blessed Virgin: Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia, London: William Heinemann, →OCLC, page 215: ↩

  3. 1913 August, L[ucy] M[aud] Montgomery, “The Christmas Harp”, in The Golden Road, Boston, Mass.: The Page Company, published April 1926, →OCLC, pages 31–32: ↩

  4. 2004 April 26, Richard Schickel, “Sean Penn: Necessary Actor”, in Time ‎, archived from the original on 6 March 2008: ↩

  5. 2017 November 16, Jo Ellison, “Help: the gym has turned us into slobs”, in Financial Times ‎: ↩

  6. Douglas Harper (2001–2026), “insouciant”, in Online Etymology Dictionary. ↩

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