VividLex

Home / Thesaurus / ingenuity

Thesaurus: ingenuity

The quality or power of ready invention; quickness or acuteness in forming new combinations; ingeniousness; skill in devising or combining.

Full dictionary entry Search Lens associations

Related headwords

Definitions

  1. n. The quality or power of ready invention; quickness or acuteness in forming new combinations; ingeniousness; skill in devising or combining.
  2. n. Curiousness, or cleverness in design or contrivance; as, the ingenuity of a plan, or of mechanism.
  3. n. Openness of heart; ingenuousness.
  4. n. the power of creative imagination
  5. n. the property of being ingenious
  6. 1. The quality or power of ready invention; quickness or acuteness in forming new combinations; ingeniousness; skill in devising or combining. All the means which human ingenuity has contrived. Blair. 2. Curiousness, or cleverness in design or contrivance; as, the ingenuity of a plan, or of mechanism. He gives . . . To artist ingenuity and skill. Cowper. 3. Openness of heat; ingeniuousness. [Obs.] The stings and remores of natural ingenuity, a principle that men scarcely ever shake off, as long as they carry anything of human nature about them. South. Syn. -- Inventiveness; ingeniousness; skill; cunning; cleverness; genius. -- Ingenuity, Cleverness. Ingenuity is a form of genius, and cleverness of talent. The former implies invention, the letter a peculiar dexterity and readiness of execution. Sir James Mackintosh remarks that the English overdo in the use of the word clever and cleverness, applying them loosely to almost every form of intellectual ability.
  7. n:100 n. the property of being ingenious