Meanings
sapiens1
plural sapientes
- A human being (Homo sapiens).
The earliest sapiens were gatherers, scavengers, and hunters of food.
2000, William H. Libaw, How we got to be human: subjective minds with objective bodies, page 2772 more examples
Even if we assume that the rate of change was slow and the evolving population large, we must still assume that sapiens was rather isolated.
2005, Sherwood L. Washburn, Classification and Human Evolution, page 335But as long as scholars viewed Neanderthals as simple brutes barely scraping by in ice age Europe, it was easy to give Sapiens the benefit of the doubt.
2020 November 7, Yuval Noah Harari, “At Home With Our Ancient Cousins, the Neanderthals”, in The New York Times, →ISSN, archived from the original on 08 Mar 2021
Sapiens2
- pluralplural of Sapien
Synonyms & antonyms
Origin
- Latinsapiēns
- translingualHomo sapiens
- Englishsapiens
From translingual Homo sapiens, from Latin sapiēns, present active participle of sapiō (“discern, be capable of discerning”).
More words from translingual, Latin
Full word history & related roots →Rhymes & wordplay
Anagrams
Cite this entry
sapiens. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/sapiens
“sapiens.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/sapiens. Accessed November 3, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “sapiens,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/sapiens.
Source: sapiens on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.