Meaning of naive in English

naive

adjective

mainly disapproving (also naïve, naïf)

/naɪˈiːv/ us

/naɪˈiːv/

too willing to believe that someone is telling the truth, that people's intentions in general are good, or that life is simple and fair. People are often naive because they are young and/or have not had much experience of life:

She was very naive to believe that he'd stay with her.

They make the naive assumption that because it's popular it must be good.

It was a little naive of you to think that they would listen to your suggestions.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Naive & trusting

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(Definition of naive from the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus © Cambridge University Press)

naive | American Dictionary

naive

adjective

/nɑˈiv/

too ready to believe someone or something, or to trust that someone’s intentions are good, esp. because of a lack of experience:

It was naive of her to think that she would ever get her money back.

(Definition of naive from the Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary © Cambridge University Press)

Examples of naive

naive

Because of this extension, the naive adaptation of labelled bisimulations from the pi calculus is too strong to be useful for the purposes of verification.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

In both cases, a naive essentialism causes partial truths to eclipse the larger picture.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

This study was performed on naive animals only.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Disagreements were resolved by a third naive rater.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Let us implement a naive choice point, namely one that defines a set of alternative statements to be chosen.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

The epistemological beliefs characterising new course economics were the ideals of a naive empiricism rather than those of modern critical positivism.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Evolutionary and immunological processes are shown to be especially important when parasites are introduced into new habitats with naive hosts.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

We estimated three (basic, naive, and extended) specifications for each of the eight models.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

This series yields exponential behavior of naive compilation (along first column) to decisions trees.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

There is sometimes a surprisingly naive willingness to blame nineteenth-century women for failing to have late-twentieth-century attitudes about race or class or sexuality.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Chapter 6 improves naive backtracking using look-back schemes for backjumping and learning.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Collective security, they believed, was a chimera, designed for the credulously naive.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Introductions to naive host populations elsewhere have caused severe epidemics.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

This criterion was used in the old days to criticize the practice of attributing to agents adaptive and other naive expectations schemes.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

How could he, and he alone, be naive and immersed in bad faith and false consciousness?

From the Cambridge English Corpus

These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.

Translations of naive

in Chinese (Traditional)

輕信的, 天真的, 幼稚的…

Meaning of naive in English

Related word

naive | American Dictionary

Examples of naive

Translations of naive

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