sapience

English

Etymology

Borrowing from Old French sapience, from Latin sapientia.

Noun

sapience ‎(usually uncountable, plural sapiences)

1. The property of being sapient, the property of possessing or being able to possess wisdom.
   • 1478, Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, "The Wife of Bath's Tale" 1195-8, [1]

     Povert is hateful good, and, as I gesse, / A ful greet bringer out of bisinesse; / A greet amender eek of sapience / To him that taketh it in pacience.

   • 1651, Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Part I, Chapter V, [2]

     As much Experience, is Prudence; so, is much Science, Sapience.

   • 1674, John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book VII, 192-6, [3]

     Mean while the Son / On his great Expedition now appeer'd, / Girt with Omnipotence, with Radiance crown'd / Of Majestie Divine, Sapience and Love / Immense, and all his Father in him shon.

   • 1924, Herman Melville, Billy Budd, London: Constable & Co., Chapter 8, [4]

     Was it that his eccentric unsentimental old sapience, primitive in its kind, saw or thought it saw something which, in contrast with the war-ship's environment, looked oddly incongruous in the Handsome Sailor?

   • 1926, Dorothy Parker, "Ballade at Thirty-Five" in The Collected Poetry of Dorothy Parker, New York: The Modern Library, 1936, p. 60,

     This, a solo of sapience, / This, a chantey of sophistry, / This, the sum of experiments— / I loved them until they loved me.

   • 2009, Robert Brandom, Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas

     I then marked out three ways in which we can instead describe and demarcate ourselves in terms of the sapience that distinguishes us from the beasts of forest and field.

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French

Etymology

From Middle French sapience, from Old French sapience, a borrowing from Latin sapientia.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /sapjɑ̃s/

Noun

sapience f ‎(plural sapiences)

1. wisdom, sapience

Related terms

• savoir

External links

• “sapience” in le Trésor de la langue française informatisé (The Digitized Treasury of the French Language).

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Middle French

Etymology

From Old French sapience.

Noun

sapience f (plural sapiences)

1. wisdom, sapience
   • 1534, François Rabelais, Gargantua:

     car leur sçavoir n'estoit que besterie et leur sapience n'estoit que moufles

     for their knowledge was just nonsense and their wisdom was just waffle.

Descendants

• French: sapience

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Old French

Etymology

Borrowing from Latin sapientia.

Noun

sapience f ‎(oblique plural sapiences, nominative singular sapience, nominative plural sapiences)

1. wisdom, sapience

Descendants

• English: sapience (borrowed)
• Middle French: sapience
  • French: sapience