Word.ws English Dictionary

naïve

naïve is the alternative spelling of naive.

naïve is the feminine of naïf.

Meaning of naive

Adjective

naive (comparative naiver or more naive, superlative naivest or most naive)

  1. Lacking worldly experience, wisdom, or judgement; unsophisticated.
    • Whether by design or driven by the force of circumstances, they have always directed their main effort toward gaining the support of this "elite," while the more conservative groups have acted, as regularly but unsuccessfully, on a more naive view of mass democracy and have usually vainly tried...1949, F. A. Hayek, “The Intellectuals and Socialism”, in University of Chicago Law Review, volume 16, number 3, Chicago: University of Chicago, →DOI, page 418
  2. Not having been exposed to something.
    • Animals entering shelters are either (a) immunologically naïve and susceptible to infection and development of disease if exposed to pathogens; (b) already immune […]2011, Lila Miller, Kate Hurley, Infectious Disease Management in Animal Shelters
  3. Produced in a simple, childlike style, deliberately rejecting sophisticated techniques.
    • By 1921 when Miró painted his key work, naive painting had been recognized by the avantgarde art world as a genre in its own right.2006, Janis Mink, Joan Miró, →ISBN, page 33
  4. Intuitive; designed to follow the way ordinary people approach a problem.
    • We have experiments of running our matching algorithm and a naive matching algorithm for such a term tree and a tree, and have compared the performance of the two algorithms.2007, Takao Terano, Huan Liu, Arbee L.P. Chen, Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, →ISBN

See all 5 meanings of naive

Meaning of naïf

Adjective

naïf (comparative more naïf, superlative most naïf)

  1. Naive.
    • Doenitz was naïf to assume that England would have stood idly by while Germany built up her U-boat force to four figures; but it was true enough that the German Navy was unprepared for a submarine war.1947, S.E. Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, Little, Brown, & Company, page 5

See all 2 meanings of naïf

Forms of naïve

Adjective
comparativenaïver
comparativemore naïve
superlativenaïvest
superlativemost naïve
Noun
pluralnaïves

Origin of naïve

Unadapted borrowing from French naïve, feminine of naïf.

Words formed from naïve

Phrases with naïve

Questions about naïve

What is naïve the alternative spelling of?
Naïve is the alternative spelling of naive.

Words near naïve in the dictionary

  1. naïf
  2. naïfly
  3. naïfness
  4. naïfs
  5. naïs
  6. naïve
  7. naïve realism
  8. naïve realist
  9. naïve realists
  10. naïvely
  11. naïveness

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: naïve (page history and authors); naive (page history and authors); naïf (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-naïve.wav.

Cite this entry: “naïve.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/na%C3%AFve. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.