quiddity
Americannoun
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quiddities
plural
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Also called whatness. the quality that makes a thing what it is; the essential nature of a thing.
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a trifling nicety of subtle distinction, as in argument.
noun
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philosophy the essential nature of something Compare haecceity
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a petty or trifling distinction; quibble
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of quiddity
First recorded in 1350–1400; from Medieval Latin quidditās, equivalent to Latin quid “what” + -itās noun suffix; see -ity
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."
Vocabulary lists containing quiddity
Two-Faced Words: Contronyms
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The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
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Henry IV, Part 1
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
And one of the few hopeful things I observed, in an otherwise grim time, was that, despite the advancing creep of retail sameness that long predated a pandemic, plenty of quiddity remained.
From New York Times ● Sep. 15, 2021
As always, Herzog tries to remold his subject into an honorary Herzogian, all quirk and quiddity.
From The New Yorker ● May 3, 2019
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
Thereupon came the by-play of the Humorist—after the fashion of Munden, who, according to Charles Lamb, "understood a leg of mutton in its quiddity."
From Charles Dickens as a Reader by Kent, Charles Foster
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
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
Once her eye adjusted to the determined quiddities of her adopted hometown, she said, “Even weird cinder-block strange things from the 1950s started to look fabulous.”
From New York Times ● Jun. 12, 2015
Patterson's towering editorial rages have largely disappeared, and his quiddities, which persisted out of habit, now seem to be receding.
From Time Magazine Archive
He would not have overthrown one of her quiddities for the world; it would be taking away a part of his capital in existence.
From The Pearl of Orr's Island A Story of the Coast of Maine by Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
