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.

Perhaps my cynicism about Mr. Witkoff’s curious mix of ingenuousness and rapacity is unfair.

From The Wall Street Journal • Dec. 1, 2025

“We are transported by the ingenuousness and the originality of the show,” he wrote.

From New York Times • Oct. 7, 2022

“If you look at our shantytowns, there’s an ingenuousness in the way people make do with cardboard, with scraps of metal. There’s color to it. There’s life.”

From Washington Post • Mar. 12, 2019

He has an overbite and big cheeks, which add an affable and perhaps misdirecting ingenuousness to his presence, in person and onstage.

From The New Yorker • Sep. 24, 2018

Looking back, too, he thought to discern a potential slyness beneath Clytie’s open ingenuousness; but as to this one he was disappointed.

From The Red Derelict by Mitford, Bertram