Sentience
noun ·Uncommon ·College level
Definitions
- 1 The state or quality of being sentient; possession of consciousness or sensory awareness. uncountable, usually
"For a while I sat quiet, my heart beating. The place was grimly dark. The only light was a faint one from the top of the lamp which threw a white circle on the high ceiling, except the emerald sheen of the shade as the light took its under edges. Even the light only seemed to emphasize the blackness of the shadows. These presently began to seem, as on last night, to have a sentience of their own."
- 2 the readiness to perceive sensations; elementary or undifferentiated consciousness wordnet
- 3 the faculty through which the external world is apprehended wordnet
- 4 state of elementary or undifferentiated consciousness wordnet
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"My friend Bratislav believes the Amerindian, Robert Morning Sky, who theorizes that creatures on other worlds will tend to evolve to have humanoid shape, as they approach sentience, be they apelike, lizard-like, insect-like, plant-like, fungus-like, etc."
Etymology
From sentient, from Latin sentiēns, present participle of sentiō (“feel, sense”). Compare with sentence, its equivalent formation from Classic Latin sententia (for *sentientia).
More for "sentience"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.