Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun Inventive skill or imagination; cleverness.
- noun An ingenious or imaginative contrivance.
- noun Obsolete Ingenuousness.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun Ingenuousness; frankness; openness of heart.
- noun The quality of being ingenious; inventive capacity or faculty; aptness in contrivance or combination, as of things or ideas; skill; cleverness: as, ingenuity displayed in the construction of machines, or of arguments or plots.
- noun Ingenious contrivance; skilfulness of design, construction, or execution: as, the ingenuity of a machine; the ingenuity of a puzzle or a poem.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun The quality or power of ready invention; quickness or acuteness in forming new combinations; ingeniousness; skill in devising or combining.
- noun Curiousness, or cleverness in design or contrivance.
- noun obsolete Openness of heart; ingenuousness.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun The
ability tosolve difficult problems, often in original and creative ways - noun
Ingenuousness ;honesty ,straightforwardness .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun the property of being ingenious
- noun the power of creative imagination
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
Support
Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word ingenuity.
Examples
-
“The crucial test for the solution of all these intricate problems which confront and challenge our ingenuity is the sheer and forceful application of those immutable laws which down the corridor of time have always guided the hand of man, groping as it were for some faint beacon of light for his hopes and aspirations.”
McCain and Obama Court Hispanic Voters - The Caucus Blog - NYTimes.com 2008
-
I guess that sort of clean-slate ingenuity is something else America has claimed for itself as time goes on; no wonder Pyotr Ilyich is a perennial honored guest.
Archive 2009-07-01 Matthew Guerrieri 2009
-
This ingenuity is matched by Reynolds 'performance; carrying a ninety minute movie solo is no easy task, but he depicts a range of emotions from rage to terror to joy with believable aplomb.
Farihah Zaman: 2010 Fantastic Fest #2: Good Movies, Stupid Plots Farihah Zaman 2010
-
Kudos to Kellogg - this initiative shows a wonderful degree of ingenuity from the company in terms of reducing packaging costs and environmental impact as well as better meeting the needs of retailers and consumers at the same time.
-
The combination of science and human ingenuity is an unbelievably powerful thing.
-
I guess that sort of clean-slate ingenuity is something else America has claimed for itself as time goes on; no wonder Pyotr Ilyich is a perennial honored guest.
Its society offers infinite variety Matthew Guerrieri 2009
-
Human ingenuity is not infinite; we just do not know its bounds.
Learning from Lomborg, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty 2009
-
Tim is also a believer in American ingenuity and knows that products like Patch will help deliver a commercially viable way for communities to support the important work of local journalists, institutions, governments, and businesses.
-
I don't know if human ingenuity is infinite or not.
Learning from Lomborg, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty 2009
-
The combination of science and human ingenuity is an unbelievably powerful thing.
minerva commented on the word ingenuity
Obsolete: ingenuousness.
December 19, 2007
Prolagus commented on the word ingenuity
In Italian, ingenuità means ingenousness. ingenuity is ingegnosità.
April 3, 2011
sionnach commented on the word ingenuity
Prolagus is just playing a belated April fool's joke on us. Nothing he, or anyone, can say can convince me that ingegnosità is an actual word. It looks like the kind of furball a cat might throw up on one's freshly carpeted apartment.
April 3, 2011