Word Pronunciation & Dictionary

nugacity

Word Rarity Very rare

Frequency: Zipf frequency 0.00 in modern English

Syllables: nu-gac-i-ty
IPA

14

Scrabble Score

8

Letters

4

Syllables

8

Unique Chars

Meaning

noun

futility; trifling talk or behaviour; drollery

Example Sentences

"For the first time in his life of twenty-five years, Leigh Newcomber was seriously thinking of personal and practical matters; and this mental state being an untrained one, he jumped from impulse to impulse, and from reason to nugacity; and after a while reason and impulse became so commingled as to leave him in a bewildering maze of mental and moral incertitude."
"We leave out of account,’ said Enderby, ‘as being too inexpensive for serious consideration, a pastel stole at two hundred pounds. That’s a frippery, a mere nugacity.’ He smiled sillily. ‘What,’ he asked, ‘can a poet do with no money, eh? How does a poet live?"
"In the poem "Among School Children" Yeats gives the nugacity of temporal life a bittersweet rendering."

Etymology

From Latin nūgācitās (“trifling”), from nūgāx, -itās. Further from nūgor, from nūgae.

Origin

Source language: Latin

Word Breakdown

Root: nūgācitās

Frequently Paired Words

nugacious nugation nugatory

Questions

What does nugacity mean?: futility; trifling talk or behaviour; drollery
Where does nugacity come from?: It is traced to Latin.

How to pronounce nugacity

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