Inanimate
adj, noun, verb ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 Something that is not alive. rare
- 1 To animate. obsolete
"For there's a kind of world remaining still, Though shee which did inanimate and fill"
- 1 Lacking the quality or ability of motion; as an inanimate object.
"The love of the inanimate is a general feeling. True, it makes no return of affection, neither does it disappoint it; its associations are from our thoughts and emotions."
- 2 Not being, and never having been alive, especially not like humans and animals.
"I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body."
- 3 Not animate.
- 1 appearing dead; not breathing or having no perceptible pulse wordnet
- 2 not endowed with life wordnet
- 3 belonging to the class of nouns denoting nonliving things wordnet
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"All of his friends were body pillows, and all of hers were dolls; so they bonded over their fondness for animating the inanimate. However, because they were not inanimate objects but people with complex emotions, their relationship was sometimes strained."
Etymology
Inherited from Middle English inanimat(e), from Late Latin inanimātus, from Latin in- + animātus (“animated”), see -ate (adjective-forming suffix). By surface analysis, in- + animate. The noun was derived by substantivization from the adjective, see -ate (noun-forming suffix).
Borrowed from Latin inanimātus, the perfect passive participle of inanimō (“to animate”) (see -ate (verb-forming suffix)), from in- (“in, into”) + animō (“to animate”); by surface analysis, in- + animate.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.