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''sagacity'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260320113731-00-⌔
sagacity - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
English
Noun
sagacity (usually uncountable, plural sagacities)
- The quality of being sage, wise, or able to make good decisions; the quality of being perceptive, astute or insightful. [from 16th c.]
- ✤ Young ladies have great penetration in such matters as these; but I think I may defy even your sagacity, to discover the name of your admirer.1
- ✤ Immediately after the meal, when he was alone again, he set to work to examine Drayton’s papers, of which there lay quite a mass on the table near him and, leaning toward the lamp on his elbow, he weighed the meaning of each with a certain sideward sagacity of gaze, a sagacity that smiled in its self-sureness.
Swiss Family Robinson- “…near the mouth of a creek, towards which all our geese and ducks betook themselves; and I, relying on their sagacity, followed in the same course.”2- ✤ Synonyms: sagaciousness, wisdom See Thesaurus:wisdom
- (obsolete) Keen sense of smell.
- ✤ […] this Beast [the Ichneumon] is not only enemy to the Crocodile and Asp, but also to their Egs, which she hunteth out by the sagacity of her nose, and so destroyeth them […]3
Etymology
From French sagacité, from Latin sagācitās (“sagaciousness”), from sagāx (“of quick perception, acute, sagacious”) (whence -acity), from sāgiō (“to perceive by the senses”). Equivalent to sagac(ious) + -ity.
Pronunciation
- IPA: /səˈɡæ.sə.ti/, /səˈɡæ.sɪ.ti/
- Audio (Southern England): 🔊
- Rhymes: -æsɪti
- Hyphenation: sa‧ga‧ci‧ty
Printed 2026-06-28.
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Link to original Footnotes
1813 January 27, [Jane Austen], chapter 15, in Pride and Prejudice: […], volume, London: […] [George Sidney] for T[homas] Egerton, […], →OCLC: ↩
1904, M. P. Shiel, The Evil That Men Do , London: Ward, Lock & Co., Chapter: ↩
1607, Edward Topsell, The History of Four-footed Beasts, Serpents, and Insects , London: G. Sawbridge et al., published 1658, page 352: ↩
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