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sanity

UK/ˈsæn.əˌti/US/ˈsæn.ə.ti/
nounB2Common in everyday speech and writing · #5,048 of 15,258neutral

Sanity is soundness of mind and reasonable judgement. Question his sanity, keep your sanity, a return to sanity.

It is a legal and everyday word rather than a medical one — psychiatry does not use it, and insanity survives only as a defence in court. A sanity check in engineering is a quick test that an answer is not obviously absurd. The Latin sanus means healthy.

Definitions of sanity

  1. 1nounsanitySoundness of mind and reasonable judgement.B2

    “Working from home with three small children tested my sanity.”

sanity is a state of mind.

Where it comes from

Latin sanitas means health, from sanus, healthy. Sane and sanitary are relatives.

  1. Latin

    sānitās

  2. Middle French

    sanité

  3. Middle English

    sanite

  4. English, today

    sanity

Built from

  • sānus · Latin — healthy
  • -itās · Latin — -ity

From Middle English sanite, sanyte, sanytee, from Middle French sanité, from Latin sānitās, from sānus (“healthy”) + -itās (“-ity”). by surface analysis, sane + -ity.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

sanity in the wild

  • The point of a sanity test is to rule out certain classes of obviously false results, not to catch every possible error.

    Sanity check

  • The advantage of performing an initial sanity test is that of speedily evaluating basic function.

    Sanity check

  • When Groucho mentions the "sanity clause", Chico responds, "You can't fool me.

    There Ain't No Sanity Clause

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

the -itās family

sanity

sanity — used about once every 1,210 pages · #5,048 · point at the bar for the others

  • sanitary
  • sanitation