quiddity

American  

[kwid-i-tee] / ˈkwɪd ɪ ti /

noun

• quiddities
  plural

1. Also called whatness. the quality that makes a thing what it is; the essential nature of a thing.

2. a trifling nicety of subtle distinction, as in argument.

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quiddity British  

/ ˈkwɪdɪtɪ /

noun

1. philosophy the essential nature of something Compare haecceity

2. a petty or trifling distinction; quibble

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Other Word Forms

Noun Inflected Forms

• quiddities
  plural

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Etymology

Origin of quiddity

First recorded in 1350–1400; from Medieval Latin quidditās, equivalent to Latin quid “what” + -itās noun suffix; see -ity

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Explanation

When a politician avoids answering a question while pretending to answer it, she often does it using quiddity, or by bringing up irrelevant and distracting points. Quiddity is a usefully sneaky tool if you want to evade an argument or question, and it's often used by people like lawyers in court and teenagers angling for later curfews. The noun quiddity has a philosophical meaning too, "the essential nature of something," or the unique thing that makes it what it is. The Medieval Latin root, quidditas, translates literally as "whatness."

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

quiddity quiddities

Ample quotations from Hardwick allow her restless quiddity to come through.

From New York Times ● Nov. 3, 2021

He used his repertoire of gestures honed from years of doing caricatures not to generalise about a face, to fix it for all time, but to capture its quiddity.

From The Guardian ● Sep. 30, 2016

Sapped of quiddity, she has become “an all-American girl.”

From New York Times ● Jun. 23, 2016

Beautifying asphalt would seem to be no cinch, but the naked quiddity of the stuff, after a third or fourth look, turns cherishable.

From The New Yorker ● Mar. 21, 2016

This physiology was not formally arranged into definitions obtained by induction from experience, but nevertheless there was the same search for the quiddity of the loadstone.

From The Natural Philosophy of William Gilbert and His Predecessors by W. James King

Managers, doormen and valets, with their quiddities and quirks, help set the tone for the singular ecosystem that is any given apartment building, as Mr. Soffer, the banker, explained.

From New York Times ● Mar. 23, 2020

“When you homogenize a city, you destroy its feeling of urbanity,” Ms. Schulman said, referring to the banks and drugstores and chains retailers steadily wallpapering over the city’s indispensable quiddities.

From New York Times ● Feb. 25, 2020

Whatever is going on, whatever misalliances and misdelving of quiddities we get into, the human heart is still beating in the same way in everybody’s chest.

From Washington Post ● Feb. 2, 2016

A Further Range, Poet Frost's latest collection, contains some 50 pieces, from two-line quiddities to an eleven-page discourse.

From Time Magazine Archive

Lyly delighted his readers with unexpected quips and quiddities, with a fantastic display of rhetoric; he showed, as no one had before him, the possible flexibility of English prose.

From Essays on Modern Novelists by William Lyon Phelps

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Related Words

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