Profound Meaning: Deep Ideas, Strong Feelings, Big Effects

Profound meaning, sense by sense

1. Deep in thought or insight. Showing great understanding. a profound question, a profound thinker.
2. Strongly felt. Intense, coming from deep inside. profound grief, profound gratitude, profound relief.
3. Very great in effect or degree. Serious and far-reaching. a profound impact, profound changes, profound hearing loss.
4. Physically deep (rare and literary). the profound silence of the cave, where it suggests deep, complete stillness.

To define profound in a phrase: reaching far below the surface. Whether the surface is an idea, a feeling or a situation decides which sense you mean.

Examples of profound in sentences

• Moving abroad had a profound effect on how she saw her own hometown.
• The child asked a surprisingly profound question about why people forget.
• We want to express our profound thanks to the volunteers who cleared the flooded street.
• The new rules brought profound changes to how small farms sell their crops.
• After the long night shift, he fell into a profound sleep on the sofa.

Common pairings

Profound pairs most naturally with nouns about effect, feeling and understanding:

The adverb profoundly works the same way: profoundly moved, profoundly grateful, profoundly deaf.

Profound in medicine and science

In health writing, profound has a specific use: it marks the most severe level on a scale. Profound hearing loss means the person hears very little or nothing without help; doctors grade hearing loss as mild, moderate, severe and profound. A profound intellectual disability is the highest level of need. Here the word is a careful technical label, not a dramatic flourish.

Profound versus deep, intense and significant

• Deep is the plain everyday word and works for water, sleep, voices and thoughts.
• Profound is more formal and usually figurative. You would rarely call a swimming pool profound.
• Intense stresses strength or energy, often in the moment.
• Significant stresses importance or size of effect, but without the sense of depth.

A common error is using profound for anything that sounds clever. A quote that is merely catchy is not profound unless it holds real insight. Overuse makes writing sound inflated, so keep it for ideas and feelings with genuine depth. You may also enjoy our pages on sublime, poignant and epiphany.

From the bottom of the sea to the bottom of a thought

Profound came into English around 1300 from Old French profont, from Latin profundus, deep or bottomless. The Latin is built from pro-, forth, and fundus, bottom, so the picture is of reaching down toward the floor. Latin used it for deep water and deep thought alike. English already had deep, so profound mostly took on the figurative senses, such as learned, serious and deeply felt. The noun profundity means depth of insight or a deep remark.

The everyday vocabulary hub gathers further weighty adjectives of this sort.