Self-consciousness
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 The awareness of the self as an entity. uncountable
"[A]nd that one great and all-important occasion and provocative of these beliefs was actually the rise of self-consciousness — that is, the coming of the mind to a more or less distinct awareness of itself and of its own operation, and the consequent development and growth of Individualism, and of the Self-centred attitude in human thought and action."
- 2 self-awareness plus the additional realization that others are similarly aware of you wordnet
- 3 Shyness; a feeling of unease in social situations. uncountable
"Adam Gopnik has, by many accounts, including his own, a lovely life. A longtime staff writer for the New Yorker and bestselling author, Gopnik lives in Manhattan with his wife, Martha, a film-maker, and their two children, and he moves in the kind of circles that allow him to drop casual lines into conversation such as: “As John Updike once said to me …”, although he has the nervy Jewish self-consciousness to follow that with “… if you’ll forgive the namedrop.”"
- 4 embarrassment deriving from the feeling that others are critically aware of you wordnet
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"Our descendants will sooner or later reach, as a race, the condition of cosmic consciousness, just as, long ago, our ancestors passed from simple consciousness into self-consciousness."
Etymology
From self- + consciousness.
Related phrases
More for "self-consciousness"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.