IMBECILITY

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does imbecility mean? 

• IMBECILITY (noun)
  The noun IMBECILITY has 2 senses:

1. retardation more severe than a moron but not as severe as an idiot

2. a stupid mistake

  Familiarity information: IMBECILITY used as a noun is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• IMBECILITY (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Retardation more severe than a moron but not as severe as an idiot

Classified under:

Nouns denoting cognitive processes and contents

Hypernyms ("imbecility" is a kind of...):

backwardness; mental retardation; retardation; slowness; subnormality (lack of normal development of intellectual capacities)

Derivation:

imbecile (having a mental age of three to seven years)

Sense 2

Meaning:

A stupid mistake

Classified under:

Nouns denoting acts or actions

Synonyms:

betise; folly; foolishness; imbecility; stupidity

Hypernyms ("imbecility" is a kind of...):

error; fault; mistake (a wrong action attributable to bad judgment or ignorance or inattention)

 Context examples 

When I came to myself, he told me “that he concluded I had been dead;” for these people are subject to no such imbecilities of nature.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

Yah, the imbecility of the whole set of 'em!”

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

“Incredible imbecility!” he cried.

(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen of a sister author; and to her treatment of the subject I will only add, in justice to men, that though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire anything more in woman than ignorance.

(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)

To women who please me only by their faces, I am the very devil when I find out they have neither souls nor hearts—when they open to me a perspective of flatness, triviality, and perhaps imbecility, coarseness, and ill-temper: but to the clear eye and eloquent tongue, to the soul made of fire, and the character that bends but does not break—at once supple and stable, tractable and consistent—I am ever tender and true.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

Would it be considered forward if I was to say to you, sir, in confidence, that since the sister came to help, the brother and sister between them have nearly reduced her to a state of imbecility?

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

At last, the same gentleman who had been my interpreter, said, “he was desired by the rest to set me right in a few mistakes, which I had fallen into through the common imbecility of human nature, and upon that allowance was less answerable for them. That this breed of struldbrugs was peculiar to their country, for there were no such people either in Balnibarbi or Japan, where he had the honour to be ambassador from his majesty, and found the natives in both those kingdoms very hard to believe that the fact was possible: and it appeared from my astonishment when he first mentioned the matter to me, that I received it as a thing wholly new, and scarcely to be credited. That in the two kingdoms above mentioned, where, during his residence, he had conversed very much, he observed long life to be the universal desire and wish of mankind. That whoever had one foot in the grave was sure to hold back the other as strongly as he could. That the oldest had still hopes of living one day longer, and looked on death as the greatest evil, from which nature always prompted him to retreat. Only in this island of Luggnagg the appetite for living was not so eager, from the continual example of the struldbrugs before their eyes.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)