Meaning & use
innocent
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Meanings
adjectivecomparablelegal
Not guilty of a crime or other wrongdoing.
Grammar: Often followed by of: innocent of the charge.
Patterns
- innocent of something
- prove someone innocent
The jury found him innocent of all charges.
She insisted that she was innocent.
An innocent person should never be punished.
adjectivebefore a noun
Not involved in a harmful event and not deserving to be hurt by it.
Grammar: Used before nouns like victim or bystander.
Patterns
- innocent victim
- innocent bystander
Innocent bystanders were caught in the traffic accident.
The war cost thousands of innocent lives.
Many innocent customers were affected by the outage.
adjectivecomparable
Lacking experience of the world's evils, simple and trusting like a child.
Grammar: Describes people and their looks or manners: an innocent smile.
Patterns
- an innocent smile
- as innocent as a lamb
The child gave an innocent smile and held out the cookie.
He was too innocent to see the trick.
Her innocent questions made everyone laugh.
adjectivebefore a noun
Not meant to cause harm or offense.
Grammar: Often used for remarks or mistakes.
Patterns
- an innocent mistake
- an innocent remark
It was an innocent mistake, and no one was hurt.
His innocent joke upset her more than he expected.
She asked an innocent question about the price.
Word forms
| comparative | more innocent |
|---|---|
| superlative | most innocent |
Common combinations
- innocent victim
- An innocent victim was hurt in the crash.
- innocent until proven guilty
- Everyone is innocent until proven guilty.
- an innocent mistake
- It was an innocent mistake and was forgiven.
- plead innocent
- He decided to plead innocent to the charge.
- completely innocent
- The boy was completely innocent.
Synonyms and how they differ
- blameless
- Blameless stresses having done nothing wrong, while innocent can also mean naive.
- guiltless
- Guiltless is a more literary word for not guilty.
- naive
- Naive stresses lack of experience in a slightly critical way, while innocent is gentler.
- harmless
- Harmless describes something that does no damage, not a person's moral state.
Opposites
Word family
- innocence noun
- the state of being not guilty or naive
- innocently adverb
- without bad intent
- innocuous adjective
- not harmful or offensive
Commonly confused: innocent or innocuous?
innocent vs innocuous
Innocuous means harmless or unlikely to offend; innocent is about guilt or naivety.
Practice
The judge said the defendant was ___ of all the charges.
Choose one answer.
Innocent of is the normal pattern with a charge. Guilty is the opposite, and blameless is not usually followed by of in this way.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “innocent”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.