Inhumane

How to spell inhumane

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce inhumane

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does inhumane mean?

1. adjectiveLacking compassion; cruel in a way that causes needless suffering.

Inhumane in a sentence

• The inspectors closed the farm after finding inhumane living conditions for the animals.

• Keeping prisoners in unlit cells for weeks struck the court as inhumane and unlawful.

Where does inhumane come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word combines the negative prefix in-, meaning 'not', with humane, which traces back to the Latin humanus, meaning 'belonging to people' and, by extension, 'kindly' or 'civilised'. Humanus itself grew from homo, the Latin word for a human being, and the Romans already linked being human with showing the gentleness and learning expected of a civilised person. In English, humane and human began as the same word, but over the 1500s and 1600s their spellings and senses split: human came to mean simply 'of people', while humane held on to the moral sense of 'compassionate'. Inhumane, recorded from the late 1400s onward, therefore means lacking that expected human kindness. The spelling trap lives in that silent, unstressed final -e of humane, which writers sometimes drop, and in remembering that the cruel sense keeps the same -mane ending as its gentle parent.

How the word is built

• in- (not)
• humane (compassionate, from Latin humanus: human, kindly)