liminality
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.64 in modern English
15
Scrabble Score
10
Letters
5
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
The state or quality of ambiguity which exists in the middle stage of certain events or rituals (such as a rite of passage or a society-wide revolution), during which the participating individual or group no longer holds its pre-ritual status but has not yet attained the status it will hold when the ritual has been completed.
Countable; Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "Slowly, the term reveals itself as an expression of fundamental tensions and deep structural antinomies: between the sacred and the profane, purity and impurity, morality and immorality, cleanliness and dirt. In conjoining such primal opposites into a single category, white trash names a kind of disturbing liminality: a monstrous, transgressive identity of mutually violating boundary terms, a dangerous threshold state of being neither one nor the other."
- "The second way Novalis seeks to repotentize his thought is by striving to evoke feelings conducive to liminality."
Etymology
From liminal + -ity.