Meanings
- derogatoryrareuncountableHumans as a group, seen as a foolish species.
What Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin have called the Sixth Extinction is the one now being perpetrated by Homo sapiens – or Homo insipiens as my old German teacher William Cartwright preferred to say.
2010, Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life, Hachette UK, →ISBN, page 2012 more examples
On the contrary, at the moment there seems to have been a slight retrograde movement; man is Homo insipiens. We are hovering on the brink of a precipice, winding round that dizzy path up which we may ultimately reach the peaks of Wisdom, but off which we may so easily topple to destruction.
1935, The Atlantic, Volume 156, Atlantic Monthly Company, page 8Homo sapiens, lost in his arrogance and avarice, destroys and razes planet Earth, turning himself into Homo insipiens, in fact unshering in the sixth great destruction and extinction of species in present time.
2016, Antonis Anastasiadis, Crystals II: 2nd Battle of the Titans: Clash between Hypercosmic and the Supernatural (Celestial Battle), AKAKIA Publications, →ISBN, page 315Synonyms: Homo idioticus
Synonyms & antonyms
nounHumans as a group, seen as a foolish species.
Origin
- Latinīnsipiēns“foolish”
- EnglishHomo insipiens
From Homo sapiens (“the human species”, literally “wise man”), replacing sapiēns (“wise”) with Latin īnsipiēns (“foolish”).
More words from Latin
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
Homo insipiens. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 5, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Homo%20insipiens
“Homo insipiens.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Homo%20insipiens. Accessed November 5, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “Homo insipiens,” accessed November 5, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Homo%20insipiens.
Source: Homo insipiens on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.