INSANITY

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does insanity mean? 

• INSANITY (noun)
  The noun INSANITY has 1 sense:

1. relatively permanent disorder of the mind

  Familiarity information: INSANITY used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• INSANITY (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Relatively permanent disorder of the mind

Classified under:

Nouns denoting stable states of affairs

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

mental disease; mental illness; psychopathy (any disease of the mind; the psychological state of someone who has emotional or behavioral problems serious enough to require psychiatric intervention)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "insanity"):

insaneness; lunacy; madness (obsolete terms for legal insanity)

dementedness; dementia (mental deterioration of organic or functional origin)

irrationality; unreason (the state of being irrational; lacking powers of understanding)

derangement; mental unsoundness; unbalance (a state of mental disturbance and disorientation)

craziness; daftness; flakiness (informal terms for insanity)

Antonym:

sanity (normal or sound powers of mind)

Derivation:

insane (afflicted with or characteristic of mental derangement)

 Context examples 

I well knew that if any other had communicated such a relation to me, I should have looked upon it as the ravings of insanity.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

To think of him as Miss Crawford might be justified in thinking, would in her be insanity.

(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)

And I could not rid myself of it by any legal proceedings: for the doctors now discovered that my wife was mad—her excesses had prematurely developed the germs of insanity.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

You, John, yes; for it is a study of insanity.

(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)

This is insanity, Holmes.

(His Last Bow, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

When, under cover of the night, I flew to Miss Mills, whom I saw by stealth in a back kitchen where there was a mangle, and implored Miss Mills to interpose between us and avert insanity.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

Memory brought madness with it, and when I thought of what had passed, a real insanity possessed me; sometimes I was furious and burnt with rage, sometimes low and despondent.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

I think that through the cloudiness of his insanity he saw some antagonism in me, for he at once fell back on the last refuge of such as he—a dogged silence.

(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)

If he were insane, however, his was a very cool and collected insanity: I had never seen that handsome-featured face of his look more like chiselled marble than it did just now, as he put aside his snow-wet hair from his forehead and let the firelight shine free on his pale brow and cheek as pale, where it grieved me to discover the hollow trace of care or sorrow now so plainly graved.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

This is either insanity or intoxication, said Miss Murdstone, in a perfect agony at not being able to turn the current of my aunt's address towards herself; and my suspicion is that it's intoxication.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)