insensible

insensible 1 Insensible, insensitive, impassible, anesthetic mean unresponsive to stimuli or to external influences.

Insensible usually implies total unresponsiveness, and therefore unawareness or unconsciousness such as may result from blunted powers of sensation, obtuseness of mind, apathy, or complete absorption in something else

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he also warned me against X, a local professor of history, as a man full of prejudice and quite insensible to evidence— Laski

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so engrossed in his work that he was insensible of the flight of time

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men have a keener relish for privileges and honors than for equality, and are not insensible to rewards— Sédillot

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Insensitive implies sluggishness in response or less than normal susceptibility; more specifically, it suggests dullness rather than acuteness of sensation or perception, thickness rather than thinness of skin, callousness rather than sympathy or compassion

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an ear insensitive to changes of pitch

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he was insensitive to all kinds of discourtesy— Joyce

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insensitive to the misery of others

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many . . . Europeans still think Americans are soulless and insensitive machines, a raw society of mass-produced healthy extroverts— Viereck

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Impassible basically and historically implies absence of response because of incapacity for feeling or suffering, but is often used synonymously with impassive or in reference to persons who by discipline have conquered the normal human susceptibility to pain or suffering

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the Hindu striving for Nirvana renders himself impassible

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or in reference to things in contrast with persons or creatures thought of as beings who through necessity of nature suffer pain or are susceptible to injury

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the language of strategy and politics is designed ... to make it appear as though wars were not fought by individuals . . . but either by impersonal and therefore wholly nonmoral and impassible forces, or else by personified abstractions— Huxley

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Svengali was sitting, quite impassible, gazing at Monsieur J™, and smiling a ghastly, sardonic smile— du Maurier

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Anesthetic implies a deadening of the mind or senses by or as if by such a drug as ether and therefore an induced rather than a natural insensitiveness

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the intelligentsia . . . neither as anesthetic to ideas as the plutocracy on the one hand nor as much the slaves of emotion as the proletariat on the other— Mencken

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all except the young girls are in a state of possession, blind, deaf and anesthetic— Cary

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Analogous words: obtuse, *dull, blunt: impassive, apathetic, phlegmatic, stolid, stoic: *hardened, indurated, callous: engrossed, absorbed, intent, rapt

Antonyms: sensible (to or of something)

Contrasted words: conscious, *aware, cognizant, alive, awake: impressed, affected, influenced, touched (see AFFECT)

2 imperceptible, impalpable, intangible, inappreciable, imponderable

Analogous words: tenuous, rare, slight, slender (see THIN adj): attenuated, extenuated, diluted, rarefied (see THIN vb)

Antonyms: sensible, palpable

Contrasted words: *perceptible, tangible, appreciable, ponderable