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conscious

adjectivenouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈkɒn.ʃəs//
  • United Kingdom//ˈkɒntʃəs//
  • United States//ˈkɑn.ʃəs//

Alert, awake; with one's mental faculties active.

adjective

  1. 1

    Alert, awake; with one's mental faculties active.

    The noise woke me, but it was another few minutes before I was fully conscious.

  2. 2

    Aware of one's own existence; aware of one's own awareness.

    The best indicator of your level of consciousness is how you deal with life's challenges when they come. Through those challenges, an already unconscious person tends to become more deeply unconscious, and a conscious person more intensely conscious.

    Only highly intelligent beings can be fully conscious.

  3. 3

    Aware of, sensitive to; observing and noticing, or being strongly interested in or concerned about.

    I was conscious of a noise behind me. a very class-conscious analysis

    Here, in the transept and choir, where the service was being held, one was conscious every moment of an increasing brightness; colours glowing vividly beneath the circular chandeliers, and the rows of small lights on the choristers' desks flashed and sparkled in front of the boys' faces, deep linen collars, and red neckbands.

    Once again the animals were conscious of a vague uneasiness.

    Furthermore, the military operator is far less conscious of budgetary constraints than is the civilian consumer.

  4. 4

    Deliberate, intentional, done with awareness of what one is doing.

    He candidly confesses that it is an effort to account for Joseph Smith upon some other hypothesis than that he was a conscious fraud, bent on deceiving mankind.

    Start fresh, try and learn from past mistakes, make a conscious effort to be a better person.

  5. 5

    Known or felt personally, internally by a person.

    conscious guilt

  6. 6

    rareSelf-conscious, or aware of wrongdoing, feeling guilty.

    He coloured very deeply, and giving a momentary glance at Elinor, replied, “Yes; it is my sister’s hair. The setting always casts a different shade on it, you know.” Elinor had met his eye, and looked conscious likewise..

    They found Aunt Carrol with the old lady, both absorbed in some very interesting subject ; but they dropped it as the girls came in, with a conscious look which betrayed that they had been talking about their nieces.

    c. 1634, John Dryden (translator), Richard Crashaw, Epigrammatum sacrorum liber The conscious water saw its God, and blushed.

Etymology

First use appears c. 1573 in the sense of "aware of wrongdoing".https://web.archive.org/web/20220714064352/https://www.lexico.com/definition/conscious From Latin cōnscius (“conscious, conscious of guilt”), itself from con- (a form of com- (“together”)) + scīre (“to know”) + -us.

noun

  1. 1

    The part of the mind that is aware of itself; the consciousness.

Forms

plural
consciouses
comparative
more conscious
superlative
most conscious
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).