different between callous vs unsusceptible

English

Etymology

From Latin call?sus (“hard-skinned”), from callum (“hardened skin”) + -?sus.

Pronunciation

• (UK, US) IPA^(key): /?kæl?s/
• Rhymes: -æl?s
• Homophone: callus

Adjective

callous (comparative more callous, superlative most callous)

1. Emotionally hardened; unfeeling and indifferent to the suffering/feelings of others.

   She was so callous that she could criticise a cancer patient for wearing a wig.

2. Having calluses.

Synonyms

• heartless
• insensitive

Related terms

• calloused
• callus

Translations

Noun

callous (plural callouses)

1. Alternative form of callus

English

Etymology

un- +? susceptible

Adjective

unsusceptible (comparative more unsusceptible, superlative most unsusceptible)

1. Not susceptible.
   • 1751, Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, 28 May, 1751, in Frank Brady and W. K. Wimsatt (eds.) Samuel Johnson: Selected Poetry and Prose, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 202,^[1]

     Imagination, a licentious and vagrant faculty, unsusceptible of limitations, and impatient of restraint, has always endeavored to baffle the logician, to perplex the confines of distinction, and burst the enclosures of regularity.

   • 1817, William Wordsworth, “Vernal Ode,” Stanza III,^[2]

     Mortals, rejoice! the very Angels quit

     Their mansions unsusceptible of change,

     Amid your pleasant bowers to sit,

     And through your sweet vicissitudes to range!

   • 1818, Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, Chapter ,^[3]

     It would be mortifying to the feelings of many ladies, could they be made to understand how little the heart of man is affected by what is costly or new in their attire; how little it is biased by the texture of their muslin, and how unsusceptible of peculiar tenderness towards the spotted, the sprigged, the mull, or the jackonet.

   • 1873, John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, Chapter 5,^[4]

     I was in a dull state of nerves, such as everybody is occasionally liable to; unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement; one of those moods when what is pleasure at other times, becomes insipid or indifferent; the state, I should think, in which converts to Methodism usually are, when smitten by their first “conviction of sin.”

   • 1994, José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World, University of Chicago Press, Chapter 2, p. 40,^[5]

     Of all social phenomena none is perhaps as protean and, consequently, as unsusceptible to binary classification as religion.

   Synonym: insusceptible