moyity

Noun

moiety (plural moieties)

1. A half.
   • They were faire Ladies, till they fondly ſtriu’d / With th’Heliconian maides for mayſtery; / Of whom they ouer-comen, were depriu’d / Of their proud beautie, and th’one moyity / Transform’d to fiſh, for their bold ſurquedry, / But th’vpper halfe their hew retayned ſtill, / And their ſweet skill in...1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book II, Canto XII”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, stanza 31, pages 370–371

   Synonyms:

   half, mediety

2. A share or portion, especially a smaller share.
   • "Thou must stand in the flame while thy senses will endure, and when it embraces thee suck the fire down into thy very heart, and let it leap and play around thy every part, so that thou lose no moiety of its virtue."1886 October – 1887 January, H[enry] Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., published 1887, →OCLC
3. Each descent group in a culture which is divided exactly into two descent groups.
   • The villages are divided into two patrilineal totemic moieties and two patrilineal ceremonial moieties. The totemic moieties are subdivided into patrilineal clans (ngaiva): there are between fifty and a hundred clans of which between ten or twenty are represented in any one village[…].1973, Francis Korn, “A Question of Preferences: The Iatmül Case”, in Elementary Structures Reconsidered: Lévi-Strauss on Kinship, Berkeley; Los Angeles, Calif.: University of California Press, →ISBN...
4. A specific segment of a molecule.
   • Aniline has both a phenyl and an amino moiety.