natural

natural adj

1 *regular, normal, typical

Analogous words: ordinary, *common, familiar: *usual, customary, habitual, accustomed, wonted

Antonyms: unnatural: artificial: adventitious

2 Natural, simple, ingenuous, naive, unsophisticated, artless, unaffected are applied to persons, their acts, and their utterances, in the sense of wholly free from pretension or calculation.

Natural implies, on the one hand, freedom from every sign of artificiality, effort, constraint, or affectation and, on the other hand, an ease, a spontane- ousness, or a flexibility that suggests nature rather than art; the term often implies opposition to whatever is labored, stiff, formal, or artificial

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set him to write poetry, he is limited, artificial, and impotent; set him to write prose, he is free, natural, and effective— Arnold

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it is of the essence of such talk that it should be natural and attractive, not professional or didactic— Benson

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she was so friendly and so natural that it was nice to talk to her about what was interesting him— Archibald Marshall

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the fact is that a poetic language which appears natural to one age will appear unnatural or artificial to another—Day Lewis

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Simple stresses complete freedom from everything that might suggest unconscious or conscious duplicity. It usually implies lack of confusion of aims, desires, interests, or values and therefore may carry one or the other of connotations as divergent as mental immaturity and intellectual ripeness, as the lack of experience characteristic of the child and the fullness of wisdom characteristic of the sage, or as the transparency of those who do not know how to conceal their nature or motives and that of those who have nothing to conceal

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nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great— Emerson

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a man of mild and simple character who up to then had shown no interest in anything at all except his collection of modern paintings— Dahl

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she was so simple and trustful that I always thought it would be as wicked to hurt her as to hurt a babe in swaddling clothes— Webb

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Ingenuous stresses inability to disguise or to conceal one's thoughts or feelings; it usually implies frankness or candor, lack of reserve, or freedom from dissimulation, often with a hint of childlike simplicity

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Father had set a dog on him. A less ingenuous character would be silent about such passages . . . but that is not his quality— H. G. Wells

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to post-Freudian ears this kind of language seems touchingly quaint and ingenuous— Huxley

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Naive implies freedom from all that is artificial, conventional, or acquired; in early use and still often, especially in its derivative noun na'iveté, it suggests freshness, spontaneity, and genuine expression of a nature untouched by worldly influences and without affectation or artifices

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by contrast with the poetry of Vergil, that of Homer seems strikingly na'ive

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a delightfully naive personality

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he claimed to himself to be innocent or naive, but his pretense was the thinnest— Cheever

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But it may sometimes become a term of derogation and then often implies lack of worldly wisdom

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Sophia, the naive ninny, had actually supposed that her walking along a hundred yards of pavement with a god by her side was not going to excite remark!— Bennett

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one does not ask favors, if it can be avoided, of persons one genuinely respects; one puts such burdens upon the naive and colorless, upon what are called the good-natured— Mencken

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Equally often, especially in learned use, it suggests the point of view of the untutored or unenlightened person or of one whose judgments are not corrected by advanced scientific or philosophical knowledge and who therefore supposes that things are what they seem to be

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the naive science of an earlier day merely took it for granted that space and time existed in their own right— Jeans

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that naive patriotism which leads every race to regard itself as evidently superior to every other— Krutch

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Unsophisticated also stresses lack of wisdom, especially worldly wisdom. It does not, however, emphasize native simplicity as strongly as naive; rather, it suggests lack of the experience or training necessary for worldly success or, more specifically, for graceful and adroit social relations

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she's not the type of the moment, not elegant or artificial, too much the unsophisticated child of nature— Rose Macaulay

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Italian civilization had, in short, everything to dazzle the imagination of unsophisticated northerners emerging into a period of prosperity— T. S. Eliot

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Artless lays the stress on the absence of design; it suggests naturalness that is the result of indifference to, or unawareness of, the effect or impression one is producing

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overflowing with . . . artless maternal gratitude— Austen

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almost every turn in the artless little maid's prattle touched a new mood in him— Meredith

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he hated to seem heavy or profound or anything but artless and spontaneous to Cecily— H. G. Wells

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Unaffected centers the attention on the absence of affectation, but it usually implies both naturalness and simplicity without any hint of childishness, unworld- liness, guilelessness, or indifference

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a well-bred, unaffected girl

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he was extremely simple and unaffected in his attitude, and readily approachable— MacCallum

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gratified by his young guest's unaffected admiration for this treasure— Wylie

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Analogous words: *spontaneous, impulsive, instinctive: ingrained, constitutional, *inherent

Contrasted words: formal, conventional, ceremonious, *ceremonial: pretentious, ostentatious, *showy: affected, assumed, counterfeited, feigned (see ASSUME)

natural n *fool, idiot, imbecile, moron, simpleton