imbecile

American  

[im-buh-sil, -suhl, -seel] / ˈɪm bə sɪl, -səl, -ˌsil /

noun

imbeciles plural

1. Informal. a dunce; blockhead; dolt.

   Don't stand there like an imbecile. Open the door!

2. 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.

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adjective

1. Informal. stupid; silly; absurd.

2. Usually Offensive. showing mental feebleness or incapacity.

3. Archaic. weak or feeble.

imbecile British  

noun

1. 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

2. informal an extremely stupid person; dolt

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adjective

1. of or like an imbecile; mentally deficient; feeble-minded

2. stupid or senseless

   an imbecile thing to do

Other Word Forms

Derived Forms

• imbecility
  noun
• imbecilic
  adjective
• imbecilely
  adverb

Inflected Forms

Nouns

• imbeciles
  plural

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.

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

imbecile imbeciles

“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

To me, she wasn’t an imbecile, but emblematic of these impossible standards, ones that Zellweger bore with painfully apologetic brightness.

From The Guardian ● Jun. 24, 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

The farmer waited on rain like an imbecile, the shopkeeper arranged row after row of necessary but dull merchandise.

From "The Underground Railroad: A Novel" by Colson Whitehead

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

I am not going to treat you like imbeciles or wayward children.

From Washington Post ● Jul. 30, 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

Last Thursday, Shkreli invoked his constitutional right against self-incrimination at a House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing on drug pricing, and later tweeted that lawmakers in Congress were imbeciles.

From Reuters ● Feb. 9, 2016

The grouchy woman began screaming, telling us we were imbeciles, that we were all going to die, so why didn’t we eat well until then?

From "Between Shades of Gray" by Ruta Sepetys