Insincerity

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The quality of not expressing true feelings or honesty, often implying deceit or pretense
2. The state of being dishonest or pretending to have feelings that are not real
3. A condition where someone feigns sincerity or honesty without genuine emotion

Etymology: Insincerity is simply the English prefix "in-" attached to "sincerity," and the pairing is more layered than it looks. The prefix "in-" is a negating element, the same one that makes "inactive" or "incorrect," and it arrived in English through Latin, where it had the same negating role. The Latin root behind "sincerity" is "sincerus," meaning clean, pure, or undamaged, and English took the adjective "sincere" from it. Sincerity, the noun, came from that adjective, so insincerity means, literally, the state of not being pure or unmixed in one's intentions. The source traces the "sincerity" half through Middle English and Latin, while the "in-" half reaches back to a very old Proto-Indo-European negative root that also produced negatives in many other languages. Because "in-" is so widely shared across Indo-European, it appears in English through many routes, and here it is attached directly to a word already in English. That makes "insincerity" a straightforward formation rather than a borrowing, and it is a good example of how English prefixes can be fastened onto a noun that arrived centuries earlier.

Synonyms: dishonesty, hypocrisy, duplicity, falsehood

Antonyms: sincerity, honesty, truthfulness