imbecile
Americannoun
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imbeciles
plural
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Informal. a dunce; blockhead; dolt.
Don't stand there like an imbecile. Open the door!
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Psychology. (no longer in technical use; now considered offensive) a person of the second order in a former and discarded classification of intellectual disability, above the level of idiocy, having a mental age of seven or eight years and an intelligence quotient of 25 to 50.
noun
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psychol a person of very low intelligence (IQ of 25 to 50), usually capable only of guarding himself against danger and of performing simple mechanical tasks under supervision
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informal an extremely stupid person; dolt
adjective
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of or like an imbecile; mentally deficient; feeble-minded
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stupid or senseless
an imbecile thing to do
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of imbecile
First recorded in 1540–50; earlier imbecill, from Latin imbēcillus “weak”; -ile replacing -ill by confusion with suffix -ile
Explanation
If your best friend calls you an imbecile, he's implying that you're stupid, and he's probably pretty angry with you. An imbecile is an extremely stupid person. The noun imbecile is used informally as an insult to mean "fool". Its origins are in the Latin word imbecille, "weak or feeble," and it was an official medical term for people with a specific (and low) I.Q. in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Patients who were classified as imbeciles were said to have no more intelligence than a seven year-old child.
Vocabulary lists containing imbecile
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
“That was the message that the universe was shouting at us loud and clear. And it would’ve taken an imbecile to ignore that market message,” Needham said.
From Washington Post ● Mar. 2, 2021
"It took me three hours to get to where I am this morning, because the Mayor of London is an imbecile," he says with his usual tact.
From BBC ● Nov. 29, 2020
"Any imbecile might decide on a certain Monday to become a captain, and by Tuesday, with no qualifications whatsoever, that imbecile could take charge of a 300,000-ton vessel and the thousands of lives contained within."
From Salon ● Jan. 21, 2020
But he went on to add, “John Dingell was not exactly a wallflower. John Dingell called the president an imbecile in his closing months.”
From Washington Times ● Dec. 22, 2019
“Luke was so scared he almost didn’t get himself down from there. Nell, what an imbecile you are.”
From "The Haunting of Hill House" by Shirley Jackson
Tungay said he was "treating the French like imbeciles, making all these so-called tough declarations when the record is so catastrophic".
From BBC ● May 5, 2025
Venice Mayor Luigi Brugnaro called the culprits "imbeciles" after they were filmed on the waterway on Wednesday, and offered a restaurant dinner to anyone who could identify them.
From Reuters ● Aug. 18, 2022
Brantley Starr wrote an extravagantly snide and condescending opinion that essentially called government attorneys imbeciles who can’t even read Wikipedia.
From Slate ● May 14, 2020
In an instant, in the eyes of some classmates and rivals alike, they went from promising freshmen to everlasting imbeciles.
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 11, 2020
They were imbeciles, as well as being the Sassenach, and she herself was a saint She was, she discovered with a change of posture, interested in nothing but her darling boys.
From "The Once and Future King" by T. H. White
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
