Sensitive describes someone who feels things deeply and is hurt easily. One joke about her cooking and she goes quiet for the rest of the evening. A sensitive child cries at the sad part of the film and is still thinking about it at bedtime.
Sensitive reaches well past feelings. Skin is sensitive, and so is a smoke alarm or a microphone: sensitive there means it reacts to very little. Sensitive information is information that has to be kept quiet, and a sensitive subject is one you raise carefully at dinner. The phrase to learn is sensitive TO — sensitive to criticism, sensitive to light, sensitive to the cold. Do not mix sensitive up with sensible: a sensible person makes good decisions, a sensitive person feels things sharply. The noun is sensitivity and the opposite is insensitive.
1adjectivesensitiveFeeling emotions strongly and easily upset by what people say or do.~7%
“He is sensitive about his height, so leave it alone.”
synonyms: touchy, thin-skinned
2adjectiveresponsiveReacting to very small amounts of light, sound, heat or a substance.~66%
“The camera has a sensitive microphone that picks up every whisper.”
synonyms: responsive, delicate
3adjectiveconfidentialNeeding to be handled carefully because it is secret or likely to upset people.~20%
“The file holds sensitive information about patients.”
synonyms: confidential, delicate
4adjectivethoughtfulAware of other people's feelings and careful with them.~7%
“She is a sensitive teacher who notices when a child is struggling.”
synonyms: thoughtful, tactful
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 15 sentences found in the wild and placed 15 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Sensitive arrived through Middle French sensitif from Medieval Latin sensitivus, a word built straight on sense. That is the whole idea in one line: a sensitive person, a sensitive nerve and a sensitive microphone are all sensing instruments, tuned finely enough that a small thing gets through. What changed over the centuries is only what does the sensing.
Medieval Latin
sensitivus
Middle French
sensitif
English, today
sensitive
From Middle French sensitif, from Medieval Latin sensitivus. by surface analysis, sense + -ite + -ive.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA