Word.ws English Dictionary

funicity

funicity noun: an inbuilt quality of materials that permanently “remember” their original time and place of creation.

Noun

funicity (uncountable)

  1. An inbuilt quality of materials that permanently “remember” their original time and place of creation.
    • For some quark, perhaps, the measure of its funicity is zero.1995, David Hawkins, “The Grand Laws of Scale”, in Thinking Physics for Teaching
  2. The reflection of an object's own history in its current form.
    • In this grey and lugubrious "history," form is all, and any work of art incorporates traces of its (own) funicity.1985, D Preziosi, That obscure object of desire: The art of art history
    • Our ability to read historical change and transformation in the funicity of things - the very bedrock of our socialization - is a socio-semiotic skill we begin to acquire in infancy, and is refined throughout our lives.2011, Takeshi Ogura, Dynamic Aspects Of Natural Products Chemistry, →ISBN, page 30

Origin of funicity

Coined by Viktor Weisskopf from the name of Ireneo Funes, a character who lost his ability to forget, in Jorge Luis Borges' short story Funes the Memorious (Funes el memorioso, 1942). See -ic, -ity.

Questions about funicity

What does funicity mean?
Funicity means an inbuilt quality of materials that permanently “remember” their original time and place of creation.
What part of speech is funicity?
Funicity is a noun.

Words near funicity in the dictionary

  1. funhouse
  2. funhouse mirror
  3. funhouse mirrors
  4. funhouses
  5. funic
  6. funicity
  7. funicle
  8. funicles
  9. funicular
  10. funicular polygon
  11. funicular polygons

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: funicity (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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