totality

American  

[toh-tal-i-tee] / toʊˈtæl ɪ ti /

noun

totalities plural

1. something that is total or constitutes a total; the total amount; a whole.

2. the state of being total; entirety.

3. Astronomy. total obscuration in an eclipse.

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totality British  

/ təʊˈtælɪtɪ /

noun

1. the whole amount

2. the state of being total

3. the state or period of an eclipse when light from the eclipsed body is totally obscured

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Other Word Forms

Noun Inflected Forms

• totalities
  plural

Etymology

Origin of totality

First recorded in 1590–1600; total + -ity

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

totality totalities

The 12 August eclipse will be the first total solar eclipse visible over mainland Europe since 1999, with Spain and northern Portugal being the only places to see totality.

From BBC ● Jul. 26, 2026

The transformer does all of that work repeatedly against a vast “context,” or the totality of the information a model can handle at one time in working memory.

From The Wall Street Journal ● May 14, 2026

“If you look at the totality over the last month, yes, we’ve struggled, but Andy’s been a constant,” Roberts said.

From Los Angeles Times ● May 10, 2026

“When you actually look at the totality of what’s being put forward, we are seeing a total gutting of a resource base,” she told NOTUS.

From Slate ● May 2, 2026

Wittgenstein wrote in the Tractatus that ‘The world is the totality of facts, not of things.’

From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton

The moon was bathed in the reflected red and orange hues of Earth’s sunsets and sunrises for about 1 1/2 hours, one of the longest totalities of the decade.

From Seattle Times ● May 16, 2022

Essentially, we need to understand that mass immunity is not a matter of totalities; rather, it is a continuum that stretches from "can't ever be infected" to "won't be hospitalized or will die if infected."

From Salon ● Sep. 11, 2020

The longest totalities provide about six minutes of being in the complete shadow of the moon.

From Salon ● Aug. 19, 2017

The paranoid outlook can be internally logical, never trivializing, and capable of explaining any or all observed phenomena as aspects of larger, symmetrical totalities.

From Slate ● May 31, 2017

But in the history of the world, the individuals we have to do with are peoples, totalities that are States.

From The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 07 Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English. in Twenty Volumes by Various