Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of profundity
1375–1425; late Middle English profundite < Late Latin profunditās. See profound, -ity
Explanation
Profundity describes being thoughtful, deep, and wise. Your profundity might inspire friends to come to you for advice. Profundity comes from the word profound and it means a quality of depth or wisdom that is meaningful or even transformational. The profundity of a piece of music might move you to tears, and the profundity of certain philosophies can be deep — and a bit confusing. Profundity can describe something that's intense, like the profundity of the silence in the room following the announcement of bad news.
Vocabulary lists containing profundity
"Letter from Birmingham Jail" by Martin Luther King, Jr. (1963)
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30 GRE Words Beginning with "P"
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Excerpt from "Letter from Birmingham Jail"
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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:
"For more than 25 years, he brought a gravitas and profundity to the role, earning fans across the globe and helping to transform Super Hero storytelling forever," Marvel Studios said Thursday.
From Barron's ● Oct. 29, 2026
As attempted profundity, this doesn’t quite land, and neither does much else.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 10, 2026
Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto let a day’s stroll linger into profundity, the twilight dimming and human connection brewing in all its possibilities.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 22, 2026
“Mother Mary” is as hair-raising as it is eyebrow-raising, all spectral senselessness until, out of nowhere, the eeriness gives way to a startling profundity as the film explores remorse with biblical repercussions.
From Salon ● Apr. 24, 2026
A more complicated case, though one that unfolded outside the AEC’s security process, involved Frank Oppenheimer, a talented physicist who had received his PhD from Caltech but lacked his older brother’s theoretical profundity.
From "Big Science" by Michael Hiltzik
For those, to put it more generously, pulled in by the simple pleasures and crystalline profundities of the text.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 2, 2026
Bankman-Fried exploited the vacuity of crypto as an asset by slathering it over with what sounded like profundities but were vacuous at their core.
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 3, 2023
And there’s a high risk of sentimentality here: the precious Messiah child mewing his little Whitmanesque profundities at us about the unity of all life.
From Washington Post ● Sep. 21, 2021
The book’s prose passages are interspersed with sections laid out as blank verse, inadvertently demonstrating that mundane reflections aren’t transformed into profundities merely by centring them on the page and inserting a few line breaks.
From The Guardian ● Jan. 12, 2019
There are profundities in its bosom which have never yet been sounded, and probably never will be.
From The Ocean and its Wonders by R. M. (Robert Michael) Ballantyne
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Get a wordDefinitions 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.
