disbelief

UK/dɪsbɪˈliːf/

nounB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,621 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: disbelieves

Disbelief is the refusal or the inability to believe something. You heard it and your mind will not accept it.

It takes at or in, and the standard phrases are staring in disbelief and shaking his head in disbelief. The word describes a reaction rather than an opinion, which is why it belongs to moments rather than to arguments. Theatre and fiction rely on the willing suspension of disbelief, meaning the audience's agreement to accept the impossible for a couple of hours, which is one of the most useful phrases in criticism.

Definitions of disbelief

1noundisbeliefInability or refusal to accept that something is true.B2+
“He stared at the screen in disbelief.”

Where it comes from

Middle English
bileve
English
belief
English, today
disbelief

From dis- + belief. belief comes from Middle English bileve. From Middle English bileve, from Old English lēafa, from Proto-West Germanic laubu from Proto-Germanic laubō. Compare German Glaube (“faith, belief”). The replacement of final with is due to the analogy of noun-verb pairs with in the noun but in the verb, creating a pair belief: believe on the model of e.g. grief: grieve or proof: prove.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove, Word Building

First appears in chapter 1 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

disbelief in the wild

On a psychological level, it is a personal attitude that suspends judgment, withholding both belief and disbelief.
Agnosticism
A cross-cultural study observed that analytic thinking was not a reliable metric to predict disbelief.
Religiosity and intelligence
The series includes interviews of Arthur Miller, Richard Dawkins, Steven Weinberg, Colin McGinn, Denys Turner, Pascal Boyer and Daniel Dennett giving their views on disbelief.
A Rough History of Disbelief
The phrase "my eye" is an outdated expression of disbelief in the English language, although without the gesture.
Eyelid pull

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

belief

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