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Word of the Day Archive
Monday December 30, 2002

quiddity \KWID-ih-tee\, noun:
1. The essence, nature, or distinctive peculiarity of a thing.
2. A hairsplitting distinction; a trifling point; a quibble.
3. An eccentricity; an odd feature.

He wanted to capture not just live animals, but the aliveness of animals in their natural state: their wildness, their quiddity, the fox-ness of the fox and the crow-ness of the crow
-- Thomas Nye, quoted in "Ted Hughes, 68, a Symbolic Poet And Sylvia Plath's Husband, Dies", New York Times, October 30, 1998

So far, I have tried to intimate, through meshed parallels and contrasts, something of the nature, the quiddity, of Japanese and of American literature.
-- Ihab Hassan, "In the mirror of the sun: reflections on Japanese and American literature, Basho to Cage", World Literature Today, March 1, 1995

Boswell set biography a new ambition: capturing the copiousness and quiddity of a personality -- the self peculiarly revealed in odd quirks and, especially, in unpredictable, evanescent talk.
-- John Mullan, "Dreaming up the Doctor", The Guardian, November 11, 2000

It is neither grammatical subtleties nor logical quiddities, nor the witty contexture of choice words or arguments and syllogisms, that will serve my turn.
-- Michel de Montaigne, "Of Books"

She has looked after my interests with consummate skill, dealt with my quiddities and constantly kept up my spirits.
-- John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination

I began . . . to give some thought to the memoir I had promised to write and wondered how I would go about it -- his freaks, quiddities, oddities, his eating, drinking, shaving, dressing and playfully savaging his students.
-- Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

Quiddity comes from the scholastic Medieval Latin term quidditas, "essence," from quid, "what."

Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for quiddity