sentient
/ˈsɛn.ti.ənt/US/ˈsɛn.ʃi.ənt/
sentient adjective: experiencing sensation, thought, or feeling.
Adjective
sentient (comparative more sentient, superlative most sentient)
- Experiencing sensation, thought, or feeling.
- Consider fish, who are apparently sentient yet cognitively extremely primitive in comparison with humans.
- Obviously, other morally relevant considerations would apply to the case of a sentient fetus, as by acquiring sentience it acquires interests and moral status.
- Synonyms:
- aware
- Able to consciously perceive through the use of sense faculties.
- Antonyms:
- insensate
- Possessing human-like awareness and intelligence.
- While I had heard such talk before, I had always felt that sentient robots were in the realm of science fiction. But now, from someone I respected [Ray Kurzweil], I was hearing a strong argument that they were a near-term possibility.2000 April, Bill Joy, “Why the Future Doesn't Need Us”, in Wired
- Not even a microbe? I don't want to blow up something that could evolve into a sentient species in a couple of billion years.2002, André Bormanis, “Silent Enemy”, in Star Trek: Enterprise, season 1, episode 12, spoken by Jonathan Archer
- Synonyms:
- sapient, intelligent, self-aware
Noun
sentient (plural sentients)
- Lifeform with the capability to feel sensation, such as pain.
- An intelligent, self-aware being.
- The merpeople and the sentients who lived on the beach often hitched rides on these creatures, steering them by pressure on exposed nerve centers.1965, Philip José Farmer, The Maker of Universes
sentient meaning in Urdu, Bengali, Malayalam and Tagalog
sentient in Urdu
- آگاہ, باخبر, واقف
sentient in Bengali
- সংবেদনশীল, চেতনাসম্পন্ন
sentient in Malayalam
- living, (capable of) feeling, live
- ബോധേന്ദ്രിയമുള്ള, പ്രാണനുള്ള, സചേതനമായ, ഉണർവ്വുള്ള, ജീവനുള്ള, ഭൂജ
sentient in Tagalog
- experiencing sensation, perceiving, thinking, or feeling
- lantad
More languagesFewer languages
- sentient in Arabic
- حَسَّاس ḥassās, عَاقِل ʕāqil
- sentient in Malay
- berperasaan
Examples of sentient in a sentence
- Nearly all computer scientists agree that AI chatbots are pseudosentient rather than sentient.
- Implementing quantum bogosort increased my script's performance by 50%, but I still feel a little bit guilty about my computer killing quadrillions of sentient beings a second.
- But is there a persuasive case that the ethics of merely sentient beings should make this distinction?
Synonyms of sentient
Antonyms
Forms of sentient
| Adjective | |
|---|---|
| comparative | more sentient |
| superlative | most sentient |
| Noun | |
| plural | sentients |
Origin of sentient
From Latin sentiēns (“feeling, perceiving”), present active participle of sentiō.
Words formed from sentient
Questions about sentient
- What does sentient mean?
- Sentient means experiencing sensation, thought, or feeling.
- What is sentient in Urdu?
- Sentient in Urdu is آگاہ, باخبر, واقف. See Sentient meaning in Urdu.
- What part of speech is sentient?
- Sentient can be an adjective or a noun.
- How do you pronounce sentient?
- Sentient is pronounced /ˈsɛn.ti.ənt/ (UK).
Words near sentient in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: sentient (page history and authors); sentient (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); sentient (Bengali Wiktionary) (page history and authors); sentient (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license). 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)-Vealhurl-sentient.wav.
Cite this entry: “sentient.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentient. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.