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profound

/prəˈfaʊnd//prəˈfaʊnd/·adjective
very great or intense; showing deep insight; reaching far below the surface
Fig. 1 — Bright little dots skitter back and forth along the waterline, busy and shallow, and I almost don't notice when one of them stops.
01Definition

Profound is depth used as praise. Literally it meant deep water — the Latin profundus, 'bottomless' — and every modern sense keeps the vertical metaphor: a profound effect reaches further down than a big one; a profound thinker sees below the surface where quick minds skate; a profound silence has no bottom to touch. The word measures not size but penetration: how far beneath the visible something goes.

02In use
  • iThe discovery had a profound effect on memory research, overturning a paradigm decades old.
  • iiA profound silence followed the announcement.
  • iiiHer lecture moved from subtle observations about grammar to profound ones about the nature of intelligence itself.
03Collocations
  • a profound effect on
  • profound implications
  • a profound silence
  • profoundly changed

Family profundity (noun) · profoundly (adverb)

04Relations

=deep, far-reaching, intense, penetrating, weighty

≠superficial, shallow, trivial

06TOEFL & IELTS

'A profound effect/impact/influence on' may be the single most useful collocation in exam writing — it upgrades any cause-and-effect sentence. TOEFL vocabulary items pair 'profound' with 'far-reaching'; IELTS examiners reward 'profoundly changed' over 'completely changed'. Keep it for genuinely deep things: a profound snack is a band-7 error.

07Asked
Does profound just mean very deep?
It means deep where deep is a metaphor — and always as a measure of reach, not size. Water and holes are deep; effects, thinkers and silences are profound. The Latin profundus meant bottomless sea, and the word never surrendered the vertical: a profound change reaches further down into how things work. Calling a swimming pool profound is a joke; calling an insight deep is merely casual.
What does profound hearing loss mean?
The deepest clinical category: hearing loss beyond roughly 90–95 decibels, where even shouted speech is inaudible without amplification. Audiology grades loss from mild through moderate and severe to profound, and the word does its usual work — measuring how far down the loss reaches. 'Profoundly deaf' is the standard phrase, and it is a clinical description, not a euphemism.
When should you use profoundly instead of completely?
When depth, not totality, is the claim. Profoundly changed says the change reached the foundations; completely changed only says nothing was left out. The adverb also pairs with states that have no percentage — profoundly deaf, profoundly grateful, profoundly wrong — where completely would flatten the sense. It intensifies downward, which is why it survives scrutiny where very and totally read as padding.
What is profundity?
The noun of depth-as-quality: the profundity of a remark, of a silence, of grief. It can also be a countable thing said — 'murmuring profundities' — where the register often turns ironic: profundities in the plural are frequently suspected of being shallow. That irony is worth hearing: praising a text's profundity is safe; cataloguing someone's profundities usually is not.
What is the opposite of profound?
Superficial — surface-deep, from Latin superficies, the face of a thing. The pairing is exam gold because it maps arguments: superficial analysis notices what shows; profound analysis reaches what carries. Shallow does the same job more bluntly and more personally. The scene above stages the whole axis: bright dots skittering along the lit surface, and one thought that stops, sinks, and touches what waits at the bottom.