ingenue
noun
Did you know?
Although Becky Sharp, the ambitious heroine of William Makepeace Thackeray's 1848 novel Vanity Fair, is not usually thought of as innocent or naive, the author used ingenue to describe her as having those qualities. Thackeray's use was attributive: "When attacked sometimes, Becky had a knack of adopting a demure ingenue air, under which she was most dangerous." The word ingenue typically refers to someone who is innocent to the ways of the world, so you probably won't be too surprised to learn that it shares an ancestor—Latin ingenuus—with ingenuous, a word meaning "showing innocent or childlike simplicity and candidness." More directly, our ingenue comes from French ingénue, the feminine form of ingénu, meaning "ingenuous."
Examples of ingenue in a Sentence
Jackson McHenry, Vulture, 30 Sep. 2025
For months, Eline Van der Velden, founder of AI production studio Particle6, had been taking meetings around town and introducing her ingenue, Tilly Norwood.
—Tatiana Siegel, Variety, 30 Sep. 2025
Panday plays a convincingly gruff tortured artist alongside Padda’s struggling ingenue, and most of the screen time is devoted to their pairing instead of introducing tertiary excess.
—Proma Khosla, IndieWire, 13 Sep. 2025
With the success of TV shows like Hacks and The White Lotus, which explore the beautifully complicated, often messy inner lives of women who don’t fit the ingenue mold, perhaps more production companies will take chances on similar shows.
—Sam Reed, Glamour, 12 Sep. 2025
See All Example Sentences for ingenue
Cite this Entry
“Ingenue.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ingenue. Accessed 8 Oct. 2025.
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ingenue
noun
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