Other forms: sensibilities
Sensibility is fineness of feeling and responsiveness to impressions. A delicate sensibility.
It is not the same as sensibleness, which is the trap in the word. Offending somebody's sensibilities means upsetting their sense of what is proper.
1nounsensibilityFineness of feeling and responsiveness to impressions.
“The whole novel turns on one character's sensibility.”
sensibility is a quality.
Late Latin sensibilitas comes from sensibilis, capable of sensation, from sentire, to feel.
Latin
sēnsibilitās — intelligence; perception, sensation; sensitiveness; meaning or sense of words
Old French
sensibilité — characteristic or state of being capable of sensation
Middle French
sensibilité
Middle English
sensibilite — physical ability to sense or perceive; sensitivity to pain; type of perception by a sense organ; perception, understanding; image imprinted on the mind during perception; (philosophy) capacity of the soul to receive information from the senses, perceptibility; (in the plural) the senses
English, today
sensibility
Built from
From Late Middle English sensibilite (“physical ability to sense or perceive; sensitivity to pain; type of perception by a sense organ; perception, understanding; image imprinted on the mind during perception; (philosophy) capacity of the soul to receive information from the senses, perceptibility; (in the plural) the senses”), from Middle French sensibilité and Old French sensibilité (“characteristic or state of being capable of sensation”) (modern French sensibilité), and from their Latin sēnsibilitās (“intelligence; perception, sensation; sensitiveness; meaning or sense of words”), from Latin sēnsibilis (“detectable; perceptible, sensible”) (from sentiō (“to perceive with the senses, feel, sense; to be aware or sensible of; etc.”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European sent- (“to perceive; to think”)) + -bilis) + -tās. by surface analysis, sensible + -ity. philosophy (“in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant: emotion or feeling as opposed to the will”) is a use of the word as a German Sinnlichkeit (“receptivity and devotion to what is experienced by the senses; desire for or openness to eroticism, sensuality”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA