What does ingenious mean in english

All rights reserved. Filters 0. The definition of ingenious is clever and inventive, or someone who is smart, clever or original. Clever, resourceful, original, and inventive. Having great inventive skill and imagination.

Witty ; original ; shrewd ; adroit ; keen ; sagacious. He sent me an ingenious reply for an email. Having genius; having great mental ability. Synonyms clever. Related word ingeniously. She devised an ingenious solution to the problem. Examples of ingenious. Bizarrely messy at first sight, they ultimately reveal a hidden structure which is every bit as ingenious as that of a traditional wellmade plot.

From the Cambridge English Corpus. Endless simple yet ingenious methods were invented by the bacteria for developing the incredible diversity of observed complex patterns. All of this is ingenious and suggestive, but of little direct relevance to the seventeenth century. The proposed model is a courageous and ingenious attempt to integrate the current forms of generativism and associationism into one system. This ingenious attempt is likely to prove a failure.

An ingenious microtonal keyboard configuration, although not for pianos, was invented over a hundred years ago but has not exactly caught on. One could fill up a library with writings in many languages which are basically ingenious and ingenuous glosses on these three ideas. There are many clever ones, though: cute, thoughfful, creative, ingenious , whimsical, stunningly inventive. A good deal of the argument is sensible, even ingenious. Rather than be impressed by such ingenious playfulness, the reader or audience may feel that it is rationally indefensible upon philosophical, aesthetic, and ethical grounds.

Some of the modern, integrated applications of micropalaeontology and palynology in the oil industry are as equally ingenious as they are fascinating. Outside games required an ingenious use of local materials. Most ingenious of all the methods described in this book is the use of asymmetries in studying the development of the brain.

The second part includes an attempt to mystify the audience through ingenious theatre technology. Ingenuous means sincere or, perhaps more commonly, naive or innocent. Ingenious is most often used in the context of ideas, inventions, and solutions considered clever for their inventiveness and resourcefulness. The related noun ingenuity refers to the quality of being ingenious —cleverness or inventiveness.

Ingenuous , on the other hand, is most commonly used to describe people—typically people considered naive or overly trusting, especially due to a lack of real-world experience. Once upon a time, ingenious was used to mean ingenuous , but this is no longer the case. To remember the difference, remember that ingenious sounds like genius and is used in similar contexts—an ingenious idea might also be described as a genius idea. The middle of ingenuous sounds like the beginning of genuine , and an ingenuous person is usually a genuine one—nothing about them is insincere or intended to hide who they really are.

Example: The ingenuous inventor signed away the rights to his ingenious new creation without realizing it. Want to learn more? Read the full breakdown of the difference between ingenious and ingenuous. Should ingenious or ingenuous be used in the following sentence? Then I sort of forgot about them, until roughly , when a diabolically ingenious album called FFS—a collaboration between the Scottish band Franz Ferdinand and, once again, Sparks—caught my attention.