honesty
Pluralhonesties
- 1The quality or condition of being honest: truthful, fair, and free from deceit.
The committee praised the witness for her complete honesty under questioning.
Honesty between business partners prevents many costly disputes.
Similartruthfulness, integrity, candor, sincerity, frankness
Oppositedishonesty, deceit, duplicity, deception
Note
The everyday sense is narrower than where the word began: Middle English honeste, from Old French honesté, meant honor and integrity, and it displaced the native Old English sōþfæstnes. Today it pairs with a field (academic, artistic, intellectual honesty) or with intensifiers that make candor sound almost harsh: brutal, devastating, searing honesty. The older breadth survives in the sense of honor and decency.
- 2Any of several plants in the genus Lunaria, members of the mustard family, often grown as ornamentals for their flat, silvery, translucent seedpods.
Gardeners often grow honesty for the silvery, paper-thin discs left after its flowers fade.
A clump of honesty had spread across the shady corner of the old garden.
Note
A garden name with a reason behind it: the plant is called honesty because its seeds show through the translucent pods, with nothing hidden. Sarah Waters's Fingersmith (2002) catches the dried sprigs, "round as shillings, white as paper." Rosetta E. Clarkson's Green Enchantments (1940) lists it among greenery hung over doorways and stables for protection. Annual honesty, Lunaria annua, is the one usually grown.
- 3Honorable standing marked by decency, integrity, and proper conduct.
Have ye no wit, manners, nor honesty, but to gabble like tinkers at this time of night?
c. 1601, William Shakespeare, “Twelfe Night, or What You Will”Note
An obsolete meaning that kept the word's older breadth. In Shakespeare's Twelfth Night it stands beside wit and manners, and the King James Bible of 1611 pairs it with godliness. Both mean decent conduct, not truth-telling. In older texts, "all godliness and honesty" describes a respectable life, not a candid one. It could even be plural, as in Barnabe Barnes's "paines and honesties" of 1607.
Less common meaning
- 4Chastity; sexual purity, especially a woman's abstention from sex outside marriage.
Note
A meaning that modern readers easily misread. In Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor, to "lay an amiable siege to the honesty of this Ford's wife" is to attempt her chastity, not her truthfulness. Where the "decency" meaning covered conduct in general, this one narrowed it to sexual conduct. It is obsolete and belongs to reading older drama. In current writing it would simply be taken as candor.
Practice
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Origin
From Middle English honeste ("honor, integrity"), from Old French honesté (compare modern French honnêteté). The plant takes the name from the visibility of its seeds through the translucent pods. It displaced the native Old English sōþfæstnes and the Middle English prodonomee (from Old French prodomie).