different between numb vs unsusceptible

English

Etymology

From the past participle of nim (“to take”). Compare German benommen (“dazed, numb”). The final ?b? is a later addition to the spelling; it was never pronounced, and did not appear in the original word.

Pronunciation

• enPR: n?m, IPA^(key): /n?m/
• Rhymes: -?m

Adjective

numb (comparative number, superlative numbest)

1. Physically unable to feel, not having the power of sensation.

   Synonyms: deadened, insensible

2. Emotionally unable to feel or respond in a normal way.

   numb with shock; numb with boredom

   • 1915, Nellie McClung, In Times Like These, Toronto: McLeod & Allen, Chapter 2,^[1]

     […] when we know that hundreds are rendered homeless every day, and countless thousands are killed and wounded, men and boys mowed down like a field of grain, and with as little compunction, we grow a little bit numb to human misery.

   • 1966, Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, New York: Modern Library, 1992, Part One, p. 77,^[2]

     […] seeing the dog—somehow that made me feel again. I’d been too dazed, too numb, to feel the full viciousness of it.

   • 2016, Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time, Random House Canada, Part Three,^[3]

     […] he submitted […] as a traitor, his mind numb with vodka, submits to a firing squad.

   Synonym: stunned

3. (obsolete) Causing numbness.
   • c. 1592, William Shakespeare, Richard III, Act II, Scene 1,^[4]

     […] he did lap me

     Even in his own garments, and gave himself,

     All thin and naked to the numb cold night.

Antonyms

• sensible, sensitive

Derived terms

Related terms

• numskull

Translations

Verb

numb (third-person singular simple present numbs, present participle numbing, simple past and past participle numbed)

1. (transitive) To cause to become numb (physically or emotionally).

   Synonym: benumb

2. (transitive) To cause (a feeling) to be less intense.
   • 1861, Elizabeth Gaskell, “The Grey Woman” in The Grey Woman and Other Tales, London: Smith, Elder & Co.,^[5]

     [I was] thankful for the pain, which helped to numb my terror.

   Synonym: dull

3. (transitive) To cause (the mind, faculties, etc.) to be less acute.
   • 1912, Saki, “The Hounds of Fate” in The Chronicles of Clovis, London: John Lane, p. 219,^[6]

     […] hunger, fatigue, and despairing hopelessness had numbed his brain […]

   • 1927, Hugh Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Garden, Part Four, Chapter 6,^[7]

     The noise, the rush of air past our ears, was positively terrific. It actually seemed to numb the senses and make it almost impossible to take in impressions at all.

   • 2004, Cory Doctorow, Eastern Standard Tribe, Chapter 13,^[8]

     [The sofa] exhaled a breath of trapped ancient farts, barf-smell, and antiseptic, the parfum de asylum that gradually numbed my nose to all other scents on the ward.

   Synonym: dull

4. (intransitive) To become numb (especially physically).
   • 1918, Lewis R. Freeman, Many Fronts, London: John Murray, “Wonders of the Teleferica,” p. 270,^[9]

     […] after fumbling with numbing fingers for ten or fifteen minutes, he waved his hand with a gesture of despair […]

   • 1919, Arthur Murray Chisholm, The Land of Strong Men, New York: H.K. Fly, Chapter 18,^[10]

     […] once more his feet began to numb. Again he got down and stamped the circulation going, but as soon as he began to ride again they numbed.

Derived terms

• mind-numbing

Translations

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