Learn English – Is “unsane” a word understood by a casual English speaker

adjectivesnegative-prefixesword-usage

I have heard it used by some people e.g. Jacque Fresco, for example here.

I know that people understand the meaning of the word "insane", but what about an average Joe and his understanding of the word "unsane"?

Best Answer

I expect all English speakers to understand sane and insane.

Although you might be able to find unsane in very large dictionaries such as the Oxford English Dictionary, I would not expect many English speakers to be familiar with it. I imagine most speakers would understand it as a novel combination of un- with sane (meaning "not sane"). I would also imagine that it might take a moment to understand--although I can imagine some circumstances where it would be readily understood, particularly when contrasted with sane and when the prefix un- is stressed:

Alice: So you're saying he's sane?
Bob: Well, he's not un-sane.

But I wouldn't expect many native speakers to invent this word. Prefixing un- to sane is probably blocked for most speakers by the existence of insane. I think that anyone who did (re-)invent this word would be suspected of wordplay.

Barrie England's answer gives the result counts for insane and unsane in The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), which I'll repeat here:

   insane       3760
   unsane       2

I decided to check those two results. Neither uses unsane as discussed here; they're both references to the band Unsane. So it's really 3760 to 0, which is a pretty big ratio. Unsane is nonstandard and is essentially never used. Avoid, avoid, avoid.

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