sensitive

sensible, sensitive

1. The primary meaning of sensible is ‘having (common) sense’, i.e. the opposite of foolish, and of sensitive ‘easily offended or emotionally hurt’. In these uses they hardly get in each other's way. Where they overlap is in meanings to do with reactions involving the senses or feelings: you are sensible of something when you apprehend it with emotional consciousness and are sensitive to something when you react to it with strong emotional feeling, the words ‘consciousness’ and ‘feeling’ characterizing the difference between the two. However, sensible of now sounds old-fashioned, and a more likely choice of words might be conscious of or aware of, although these admittedly denote intellectual rather than emotional perceptions.

2. The nouns sensibility and sensitivity are harder to keep apart. Sensibility corresponds to sensible (in its familiar meaning) much less closely than sensitivity does to sensitive, and chiefly denotes (often in the plural) a person's delicate finer feelings:

• Walter was a little hurt at this since he did most of the cooking at their place, but Zimmerman was too upset to worry about Walter's sensibilities —Ben Elton, 1992.

Sensitivity has a wider range of meanings concerned with physical or emotional reactions of various kinds:

• My reference to it was simply a tease, and all the more tempting given Victor's known sensitivity on the point —Climber and Hill Walker, 1991

• This book's greatest strength is its sensitivity to Kissinger the man —Scotland on Sunday, 2004.