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Homo insipiens

Homo insipiens noun: humans as a group, seen as a foolish species.

Noun

Homo insipiens (uncountable)

  1. (derogatory, rare) Humans as a group, seen as a foolish species.
    • On the contrary, at the moment there seems to have been a slight retrograde movement; man is Homo insipiens. We are hovering on the brink of a precipice, winding round that dizzy path up which we may ultimately reach the peaks of Wisdom, but off which we may so easily topple to destruction.1935, The Atlantic, Volume 156, Atlantic Monthly Company, page 8
    • What Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin have called the Sixth Extinction is the one now being perpetrated by Homo sapiens – or Homo insipiens as my old German teacher William Cartwright preferred to say.2010, Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life, Hachette UK, →ISBN, page 201
    Synonyms:
    Homo idioticus

Synonyms of Homo insipiens

Origin of Homo insipiens

From Homo sapiens (“the human species”, literally “wise man”), replacing sapiēns (“wise”) with Latin īnsipiēns (“foolish”).

Questions about Homo insipiens

What does Homo insipiens mean?
Homo insipiens means humans as a group, seen as a foolish species.
What part of speech is Homo insipiens?
Homo insipiens is a noun.

Words near Homo insipiens in the dictionary

  1. homo
  2. homo Aristophaneus
  3. homo economicus
  4. homo faber
  5. Homo idioticus
  6. Homo insipiens
  7. homo ludens
  8. homo milk
  9. homo milks
  10. homo negronus
  11. homo negronus Americanus

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Homo insipiens (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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