Ingenious means brilliantly clever in an inventive way. An ingenious solution, ingenious design, quite ingenious.
It praises the cleverness of a device or an idea rather than the intelligence of a person in general. Note the spelling trap: ingenious means inventive and ingenuous means innocent and open, and the two are constantly swapped — disingenuous, meaning insincere, is the commonest of the family. Note ingenuity, which is the noun for ingenious; and that ingenious and engine come from the same Latin root about natural ability.
1adjectiveingeniousBrilliantly clever in an inventive way.
“She came up with an ingenious way to keep the cat off the kitchen table.”
ingenious is a quality of inventiveness.
Latin ingeniosus comes from ingenium, natural capacity — the same word that gives engine. An engine was an ingenious device before it was a machine, which is why siege engines were called that.
Proto-Indo-European
*ǵenh₁-
itc-ola
genere
Latin
ingeniōsus — endowed with good natural capacity, gifted with genius
Old French
engenious
Middle French
ingénieux
English, today
ingenious
Built from
Borrowed from Middle French ingénieux, from Old French engenious, from Latin ingeniōsus (“endowed with good natural capacity, gifted with genius”), from ingenium (“innate or natural quality, natural capacity, genius”), from in- + gignere, itc-ola genere. See also engine.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA