sentience

1. 1.

   state of elementary or undifferentiated consciousness

   “the crash intruded on his awareness”

   Synonymsawareness

   Broaderconsciousness
2. 2.

   the faculty through which the external world is apprehended

   “in the dark he had to depend on touch and on his senses of smell and hearing”

   Synonymssensesensationsentiencysensory faculty

   Broaderfaculty

   Narrowermodalitysensitivity
3. 3.

   the readiness to perceive sensations; elementary or undifferentiated consciousness

   “gave sentience to slugs and newts”

   Antonymsinsentience

   Broaderanimateness

Other forms of sentience

plural

sentiences·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about sentience

What does sentience mean?

sentience means "state of elementary or undifferentiated consciousness". That is the primary sense; the word has 3 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in sentience?

sentience has 2 syllables and divides as sen-tience under the regular spelling rules. It is not in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, so that comes from how the word is written rather than from a recorded pronunciation, and no stress or phonetic transcription is claimed for it.

What is another word for sentience?

Close synonyms include awareness, sense, sensation, sentiency, sensory faculty. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

What is the opposite of sentience?

The recorded antonyms are insentience.

Is sentience a common word?

sentience is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.