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Similar questions have beens asked before, but I believe mine hasn't quite been answered.

In the game HITMAN™, holding a suspicious item and standing close to an NPC causes the word Suspicious to appear on screen, indicating that someone is suspicious of 47.

If I then described to someone why I failed Silent Assassin, would I say that someone

  1. suspected me or
  2. was suspicious of me

or do both expressions mean the same in this context?

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  • Have you researched this and if so what have you found?
    – lbf
    Commented May 23, 2018 at 16:04
  • I have, if briefly. The results were rather... inconclusive. Some said both is fine, some claimed only one is correct, but I also tend towards "both is fine". I just wanna know because it nagged me since Day One.
    – none
    Commented May 23, 2018 at 16:07
  • You can say I suspect that person, but you can't normally say I suspect that document - probably because unless you explicitly specify what your suspicion is about the person or thing, the default assumption is he/it is guilty (was the cause of bad things happening, though not necessarily intentionally).
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented May 23, 2018 at 16:12
  • You can be suspicious of someone even if you've no idea what bad things they might do (or have done). But if you suspect them, you know what was done (and you think they might have done it).
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented May 23, 2018 at 16:14
  • ...I'm just pointing out a couple of contexts where the two usages are significantly different. Maybe someone on English Language Learners will tell you something more useful if the question gets migrated there (which is what I think should happen).
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented May 23, 2018 at 16:16

2 Answers 2

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Suspecting someone is somewhat stronger, more a belief, than being suspicious of someone which is more a feeling.

  • The guard was suspicious of me.

Suspicious (Wiktionary):

Distrustful or tending to suspect.

If you gain enough distrust from the guard he will suspect you. When you acting so suspicious (e.g. running around too much or too often) the guard will suspect you to be intruder.

  • The guard suspected me to be an intruder, because I was acting too suspicious.

To suspect (Wiktionary):

(transitive) To believe (someone) to be guilty.

I'd say you were suspected to be an intruder, because you were acting too suspicious.

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They both share a root morpheme passed down from Latin, to French, to English. They are related but an English speaker would be likely to detect nuance. One reason for this is that they are different parts of speech (Suspect(n.) Suspicious(adj.)) and different parts of speech have different functions in a language.

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