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A stock character in opera, theater, and literature. She is a girl or young woman who is endearingly wholesome and innocent. Very similar to the girl next door.

She is generally portrayed as sweet, gentle, virtuous, beautiful, demure, with the wide-eyed innocence of a child and she is very often naive. She is often the victim of the libertine, whom she may have mistaken for the hero. Often she still lives with her parents, owing to her youth and naivete.
She is usually the foil for the dangerously seductive femme fatale.
She is often involved in a romantic subplot, usually with the boy next door and the romance is typically innocent and chaste.
The ingenue is typically played by a lyric soprano in opera and musicals.
The ingenue includes the following characters:

Joanna in Sweeney Todd
Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz
Giselle in Enchanted
Pollyanna
Snow White
Rapunzel
Cosette in Les Miserables
Sandy in Grease
Maria in West Side Story
Christine in Phantom of the Opera
Ophelia in Hamlet
Juliet in Romeo and Juliet
Ariel in The Little Mermaid
Belle in Beauty and the Beast
Penny in Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog
Mimi in La Boheme
Tatiana in Eugene Onegin
ingenue by Lorelili July 7, 2011
Related Words
A female character in drama or literature. She is a sweet, pretty, if somewhat naive, young woman. To our modern eyes, she's often seen as this meek little mouse.

The ingenue is played by a light soprano in opera or musicals.
Judy Garland's protrayal of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz is the epitome of an ingenue.
ingenue by Lorelili October 29, 2005

ingénue 

An innocent girl or a young woman.
1. She's quite ingénue to be a Journalist.
2. She's ingénue for her age of girls.
ingénue by Irene17 December 14, 2020

Stealthie 

when you're holding up your phone and making faces at it, as though you are taking a selfie, but you're really taking a picture of the person across from you or the wall or anything else that seems interesting but you don't want to be caught dead taking a picture of.

This action is often made more convincing by wiggling the eyebrows or opening the mouth, to pretend you're trying to get a Snapchat filter to work.
FRIEND A: "Did you just take a stealthie of me?"

FRIEND B (turning phone around): "no I was just using snapchat's new filter, see?"
Stealthie by gwenhyfar October 2, 2016
Word of the Day on May 25, 2026

Summer Teeth 

When someone has a lot of missing teeth.
Mannn, that dude has summer teeth!
What do you mean?
Summer here, summer there...
Summer Teeth by BeckPot August 2, 2012
Word of the Day on May 24, 2026
The grindset is a contemporary ideology of self-exploitation disguised as strength, deeply tied to the aesthetics of the “sigma male” and to new digital forms of patriarchy. It promotes the idea that human worth depends on productivity, economic success, absolute emotional control, and the ability to work endlessly, turning vulnerability, rest, community, and tenderness into signs of weakness. Beneath its rhetoric of discipline and power often lies a profound inability to relate healthily to pain, fragility, and human interdependence.
“That’s the grindset, brother. While weak men sleep and complain, sigma males stay disciplined, work in silence, suppress emotions, and build power while everyone else wastes time chasing comfort.”
Grindset by Omega-Male May 22, 2026
Word of the Day on May 23, 2026