STUPIDITY

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does stupidity mean? 

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

1. a poor ability to understand or to profit from experience

2. a stupid mistake

  Familiarity information: STUPIDITY used as a noun is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• STUPIDITY (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A poor ability to understand or to profit from experience

Classified under:

Nouns denoting cognitive processes and contents

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

inability (lack of ability (especially mental ability) to do something)

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

denseness; dumbness; slow-wittedness (the quality of being mentally slow and limited)

dullness; obtuseness (the quality of being slow to understand)

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

craziness; folly; foolishness; madness (the quality of being rash and foolish)

vacuousness (indicative of or marked by mental vacuity and an absence of ideas)

Antonym:

intelligence (the ability to comprehend; to understand and profit from experience)

Derivation:

stupid (lacking or marked by lack of intellectual acuity)

stupid (lacking intelligence)

Sense 2

Meaning:

A stupid mistake

Classified under:

Nouns denoting acts or actions

Synonyms:

betise; folly; foolishness; imbecility; stupidity

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

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

 Context examples 

I should dread the stupidity of the day, if there were not a much greater evil to follow—the impression it must leave on Sir Thomas.

(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)

The former she hoped at last might have been accidental, and the latter she could only attribute to her own stupidity.

(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)

Some time hence it will be all found out, and then we may laugh at their stupidity in not knowing it before.

(Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen)

At the same time, it is stupidity rather than courage to refuse to recognise danger when it is close upon you.

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

I can only tell you that it was not so, that I was met at every turn by incredulity, born partly of stupidity and partly of jealousy.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

I trust that I am not more dense than my neighbours, but I was always oppressed with a sense of my own stupidity in my dealings with Sherlock Holmes.

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

But be it sweetness or be it stupidity in her—quickness of friendship, or dulness of feeling—there was one person, I think, who must have felt it: Miss Fairfax herself.

(Emma, by Jane Austen)

Susan is a country girl, said he, and you know the incredible stupidity of that class.

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

And while he exchanged the stupidities of stupid minds with them, before his inner sight towered the book-shelves of the library, filled with the wisdom of the ages.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

The undertaker seemed shocked at his own stupidity and exerted himself to restore things to the condition in which we left them the night before, so that when Arthur came such shocks to his feelings as we could avoid were saved.

(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)