Definition of "sapient"

"... A man would blush to say to himself in the darkness of the night the things he stands up on a platform in the garish light of day to stuff into the ears of a multitude whose intelligence he pretends that he esteems.... Therefore, why be sapient and solemn about it, like an editorial in a newspaper?" Nick added, with a smile.

1890, Henry James, The Tragic Muse

In Europe I had been told by sapient academics that there wasn't really any class system in the United States: well, you couldn't prove that by the conditions in California's agribusinesses, or indeed its urban factories.

2010, Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22, Atlantic, published 2011, page 217

[To Edgar] Come ſit thou here moſt learned Iuſtice / [To the Fool] Thou ſapient ſir ſit here, […]

c. 1603–1606 (date written), [William Shakespeare], […] His True Chronicle Historie of the Life and Death of King Lear and His Three Daughters. […] (First Quarto), London: […] Nathaniel Butter, […], published 1608, [Act III, scene vi]

Spot more delicious then thoſe Gardens feign’d / Or of reviv’d Adonis, or renownd / Alcinous, hoſt of old Laertes Son, / Or that, not Myſtic, where the Sapient King / Held dalliance with his faire Egyptian Spouſe.

1667, John Milton, “Book VIII”, in Paradise Lost. […], London: […] [Samuel Simmons], […]; republished as Paradise Lost in Ten Books: […], London: Basil Montagu Pickering […], 1873, lines 439–443

She had five or six cows; but it was observed by her sapient neighbors that she sold more butter every year than other farmers' wives who had twenty.

1839, "Bewitched Butter" in W. B. Yates (ed.), Irish Fairy and Folk Tales (1892), Barnes & Noble, 2009, p. 295

When EXPLORATION blazed through space / The first sky-trail to far-flung stars, / And found men, sapient, on Mars, / He gained renown's most honored place.

1935 February, Bob Olsen, “Who Deserves Credit?”, in Amazing Stories, volume 9, number 10, page 81

It was inhabited by a sapient humanoid race, and some of them were civilized enough to put it in Class V, and Colonial Office doctrine on Class V planets was rigid.

1962 January, Henry Beam Piper, “Naudsonce”, in Analog Science Fact and Science Fiction, volume 68, number 5, page 9

Nessus had not spoken mockingly; but Speaker reacted with rage. “What sapient being would not fear such power?”

1970, Larry Niven, Ringworld, page 72

It seemed to him a possibility that the Cold War Corps of March might have contacted hitherto unknown sapients on some just discovered interstellar planet.

1960, Philip José Farmer, A Woman a Day, page 30