sentience
/ˈsɛn.ʃəns/
sentience noun: the state or quality of being sentient; possession of consciousness or sensory awareness. Also the misspelling of sentence.
Noun
sentience (usually uncountable, plural sentiences)
- The state or quality of being sentient; possession of consciousness or sensory awareness.
- For a while I sat quiet, my heart beating. The place was grimly dark. The only light was a faint one from the top of the lamp which threw a white circle on the high ceiling, except the emerald sheen of the shade as the light took its under edges. Even the light only seemed to emphasize the...1903, Bram Stoker, chapter 5, in The Jewel of Seven Stars
- The science of animal sentience is far from a firm one; there's no way of knowing exactly what any animal is feeling.2007 December 28, Alexandra Silver, “Did This Tiger Hold a Grudge?”, in Time, archived from the original on 20 Apr 2010
Also used as
sentience is also the misspelling of sentence.
Forms of sentience
| plural | sentiences |
|---|
Origin of sentience
From sentient, from Latin sentiēns, present participle of sentiō (“feel, sense”). Compare with sentence, its equivalent formation from Classic Latin sententia (for *sentientia).
Words formed from sentience
Questions about sentience
- What does sentience mean?
- Sentience means the state or quality of being sentient; possession of consciousness or sensory awareness.
- What part of speech is sentience?
- Sentience is a noun.
- How do you pronounce sentience?
- Sentience is pronounced /ˈsɛn.ʃəns/.
- What is the plural of sentience?
- The plural of sentience is sentiences.
Words near sentience in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: sentience (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.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-sentience.ogg, en-au-sentience.ogg.
Cite this entry: “sentience.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentience. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.