Ingenuous
adj ·Moderate ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 Naive and trusting.
- 2 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."
- 3 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."
- 4 Unable to mask one's feelings.
- 5 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."
- 1 characterized by an inability to mask your feelings; not devious wordnet
- 2 lacking in sophistication or worldliness wordnet
Example
More examples"Some secret sorrow, or the brooding spirit of some moody passion, had quenched the light and ingenuous vivacity of youth."
Etymology
Learned borrowing from Latin ingenuus (“of noble character, frank”). Doublet of ingenu.
More for "ingenuous"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.