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

Further reading

• “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