INGENU'ITY, noun The quality or power of ready invention; quickness or acuteness in combining ideas, or in forming new combinations; ingeniousness; skill; used of persons. How many machines for saving labor has the ingenuity of men devised and constructed.

1. Curiousness in design, the effect of ingenuity; as the ingenuity of a plan or of mechanism.

2. Openness of heart; fairness; candor. [This sense of the word was formerly common, and is found in good authors down to the age of Locke, and even later; but it is now wholly obsolete. In lieu of it, ingenousness is used.]