precocity
/pɹəˈkɒsɪti/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.62 in modern English
18
Scrabble Score
9
Letters
4
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "1817 William Wirt, Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry, New York: M'elrath, Bangs & Co., 1834, Section I, pp. 23-4, https://books.google.ca/books?id=5vE5AAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false I cannot learn that he gave in his youth, any evidence of that precocity which sometimes distinguishes uncommon genius."
- "By the side of many tall and bouncing young ladies in the establishment, Rebecca Sharp looked like a child. But she had the dismal precocity of poverty."
- "It was as if his precocity of crookedness (and every vulgar villain is precocious) had for once deceived him, and the man he had sought to entrap as a simpleton had, through his very simplicity, ignominiously baffled him."
- "1946, Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement of Volumes I-VI by D.C. Somervell, Oxford University Press, Chapter XII, p. 242, https://books.google.ca/books?id=IbJ-31LPvyoC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false Anna Comnena, the Byzantine princess turned historian, sees our eleventh-century forebears in just this light, as appears in the mixture of horror with contempt which is her reaction to the mechanical ingenuity of the Crusaders' cross-bow, a Western novelty of her day which—with the characteristic precocity of lethal inventions—preceded by several centuries the invention of clockwork […]"
- "How can we explain the relative precocity in political studies that the Greeks demonstrated in contrast to the backwardness of other early peoples?"
- "Short stature persists into adult life but puberty is usually normal, although sexual precocity has been seen […]"
Etymology
From French précocité.
Origin
- Source language: French
Word Breakdown
- Root: *pekʷ-, précocité