sensibility

English

Etymology

From sensible +‎ -ity, from Middle French sensibilité, and its source, Latin sēnsibilitās.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˌsɛnsɪˈbɪlɪti/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

Noun

sensibility (countable and uncountable, plural sensibilities)

1. The ability to sense, feel or perceive; responsiveness to sensory stimuli; sensitivity. [from 15th c.]
   • 2011, William Thomson, Reprint of Papers on Electrostatics and Magnetism, page 204:

     The high sensibility of the divided ring electrometer renders this test really very easy […].

2. Emotional or artistic awareness; keen sensitivity to matters of feeling or creative expression. [from 17th c.]
   • 2015, Kathleen T. Galvin, Monica Prendergast, Poetic Inquiry II, page 266:

     By poetic ethic I am speaking about the intention to act on, and incorporate into a narrative configuration, values and beliefs that promote a poetic ontology and a poetic sensibility.

   • 2016 December 22, Basma Atassi, “Saddam Hussein’s daughter: Trump has ‘political sensibility’”, in CNN‎^[1]:

     “This man has just arrived to the leadership … But from what is apparent, this man has a high level of political sensibility, that is vastly different than the one who preceded him,” she told CNN.

3. (now rare, archaic) Excessive emotional awareness; the fact or quality of being overemotional. [from 18th c.]
   • 1791 (date written), Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, London: […] J[oseph] Johnson, […], published 1792, →OCLC:

     People of sensibility have seldom good tempers.

4. (in the plural) An acute awareness or feeling. [from 18th c.]

   I apologize if I offended your sensibilities, but that's the truth of the matter.

   • 2019, Li Huang, James Lambert, “Another Arrow for the Quiver: A New Methodology for Multilingual Researchers”, in Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, →DOI, page 11:

     However, given current sensibilities about individual privacy and data protection, the recording of oral data is becoming increasingly onerous for researchers[.]

   • 2024 June 18, Spencer Klavan, “A Matter of Taste”, in The American Mind‎^[2]:

     Many earnest consumers on the Right feel so legitimately embattled by the nonstop streaming feed of hate speech and psyoppery directed at them that they think they have no choice but to reconfigure their artistic sensibilities accordingly.

5. (obsolete) The capacity to be perceived by the senses. [15th–17th c.]

Translations

ability to sense; responsiveness to stimuli

• Finnish: herkkyys (fi), aistimiskyky
• German: Sensibilität (de) f, Empfindlichkeit (de) f, Empfindungsvermögen (de) n
• Greek: ευαισθησία (el) f (evaisthisía)
• Romanian: sensibilitate (ro) f
• Swedish: känslighet (sv) c

emotional awareness

• Esperanto: sentemo
• Finnish: tunneäly, tunnekyky
• German: Sensibilität (de) f, Empfindsamkeit (de) f
• Greek: ευαισθησία (el) f (evaisthisía)
• Romanian: sensibilitate (ro) f

The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.

Translations to be checked

• Bulgarian: усет (bg) m (uset)
• Catalan: sensibilitat f
• Chinese:

  Mandarin: 感觉 (zh) (gǎnjué), 感受性 (zh), 知觉 (zh) (zhījué), 感性 (zh) (gǎnxìng)

• Irish: céadfaíocht f, céadfacht f
• Japanese: 感覚 (ja) (kankaku), センス (ja) (sensu)
• Korean: 감각 (ko) (gamgak), 감수성 (ko) (gamsuseong), 감각력 (gamgangnyeok)
• Portuguese: sensibilidade (pt) f
• Russian: чуткость (ru) (čutkostʹ), чувства (ru) pl (čuvstva)
• Spanish: sensibilidad (es) f

Further reading

• "sensibility" in Raymond Williams, Keywords (revised), 1983, Fontana Press, page 280.