profundity

American  

[pruh-fuhn-di-tee] / prəˈfʌn dɪ ti /

noun

profundities plural

1. the quality or state of being profound; depth.

2. Usually profundities. profound or deep matters.

3. a profoundly deep place; abyss.

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Other Word Forms

Noun Inflected Forms

• profundities
  plural

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.

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

profundity profundities

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

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

It also carries with it a sort of readymade profundity.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 11, 2025

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

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

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

The intellect still stands aghast before the problem of the human body, lost like Pascal in the profundities of analysis, each discovery only revealing new depths of mystery.

From The Practice of Autosuggestion by Coué, Emile

Related Words

• solidity
• sophistication