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:
In “Walden,” he found constant wonder in the obvious; in “Civil Disobedience,” he mined moral profundity out of common sense.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 26, 2026
Part of the beauty and profundity of people’s psychedelic experiences is the ineffable—but the systems that run on Western science are hungry for hard data, replicable and reliable outcomes, and, perhaps most importantly, profit.
From Slate ● Jan. 30, 2026
She thanked critics for celebrating "this genre of horror films, that are overlooked and not seen for the profundity that they can hold".
From BBC ● Feb. 8, 2025
Recognizing, as he did, the profundity of humor, he might have said the same about death.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 29, 2024
And he orates random thoughts of profundity with such authority that you want to write them down and hang them on the wall, but they only allow writing instruments in the rec room.
From "Challenger Deep" by Neal Shusterman
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
As I wrote last year, Bankman-Fried exploited the vacuity of crypto by slathering it over with what sounded like profundities but were vacuous at their core.
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 27, 2024
But “Ad Astra” is more concerned with its protagonist’s inner life than the magnificent starscape outside his spacecraft, and long stretches pass with only Pitt onscreen, his voice-over pondering life’s profundities.
From New York Times ● Sep. 4, 2019
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
That there is 706 life at much greater profundities in warmer regions may be confidently inferred.
From Principles of Geology or, The Modern Changes of the Earth and its Inhabitants Considered as Illustrative of Geology by Lyell, Charles, Sir
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.
