Adjective: intellectual
Comparison Forms
Synthetic
Perifrastic
| Comparative | more intellectual |
| Superlative | most intellectual |
Sample Sentences
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intellectual powers, activities, etc.
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1920, Harold Monro, Preface to The year's at the spring; an anthology of recent poetry
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Pleasure is various, but it cannot exist where the emotions or the imagination have not been powerfully stirred. Whether it be called sensual or intellectual, pleasure cannot be willed
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Indeed, this discovery of meaning in symbols may be the most astounding intellectual feat that any human being ever performs—and most humans perform it before they are seven years old! [1972, Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book, →ISBN, →LCCN, page 25:]
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an intellectual person
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The Fenimore Cooper Indian is no doubt a brave and highly intellectual person, educated abroad, refined and cultivated by foreign travel, graceful in the grub dance or scalp walk-around, yet tender-hearted as a girl, walking by night fifty-seven miles in a single evening to warn his white friends of danger. [1894, Edgar Wilson Nye, “Chapter 30”, in Nye's History of the USA:]
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intellectual employments
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A good deal of nonsense is written about sport and entertainment. Many of us can, with pleasant ease, suspend a severely intellectual task for a few hours to witness a first-class football match. [1916, Joseph McCabe, “Chapter IX”, in The Tyranny of Shams:]
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intellectual philosophy, sometimes called "mental" philosophy
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I deem not profitless those fleeting moods / Of shadowy exultation; not for this, / That they are kindred to our purer mind / And intellectual life […] [1805, William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book II, lines 331-334 (eds. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, & Stephen Gill, published by W. W. Norton & Company, 1979)]
Adjectives inflected like intellectual
priest-ridden,
unreposed,
evadible,
dissentious,
dissentient,
unforesighted,
egocentrical,
unephemeral,
unennobling,
mensuralist,
flocculent,
unseductive,
whoopsy,
whooshy,
surrogate,
Nicodian,
unrepaired,
prismatoidal,
renorenal,
unseducible, etc. (List truncated at 20 adjectives)
Etymology
From Old French intellectuel, from Latin intellectualis.
Verbs referencing "intellectual"
French Adjectives
intellectuel, Finnish Adjectives
intellektuaalinen.