sentiment
Pluralsentiments
- 1A thought, feeling, or general impression held about a subject.
The closing speech captured the sentiment of everyone in the room.
Anti-war sentiment grew steadily throughout the long conflict.
Note
A word poised between thinking and feeling, from Old French sentement and Latin sentimentum. As a mass noun it names a mood many people share: anti-war sentiment, the sentiment that we were acting too soon. As a count noun it shifts toward views a person voices. In Ben Travers's A Cuckoo in the Nest (1922), Mrs. Spoker imparts "a few final sentiments" on buckets. That is opinion delivered, not emotion felt.
- 2Tender feelings, set apart from reason or judgment, sometimes of a weak or foolish kind.
The film traded sharp plotting for easy sentiment and tears.
She dismissed his apology as mere sentiment without any real change.
Similarsentimentality, emotion, schmaltz, mawkishness
Oppositereason, realism, rationality
Note
Here feeling is weighed against reason and usually found wanting. The word is uncountable in this use and rarely neutral: mere sentiment, easy sentiment, sentiment must be ignored. R. C. Riley, writing in 1960 on the London–Birmingham rail services, used it in exactly this way, arguing the Great Hall and the Doric Arch be sacrificed to progress. Unlike the neutral "thought or feeling" sense, it does not take a plural.
Practice
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Origin
From Old French sentement, from Latin sentimentum.