Word.ws English Dictionary

nationalities

nationalities is the plural of nationality.

Meaning of nationality

Noun

nationality (plural nationalities)

  1. Legal membership of a particular nation or state, by origin, birth, naturalization, ownership, allegiance or otherwise.
    • By living in the country for five years, you are entitled to get nationality.
  2. A people sharing a common origin, culture and/or language, and possibly constituting a nation-state.
    • Rosa Luxemburg held that the recognition of the right of nationalities to self-determination was one of the Bolsheviks' gravest mistakes.1978 [1976], Leszek Kołakowski, translated by P[aul] S[teven] Falla, Main Currents of Marxism, volume II: The Golden Age, Oxford: Clarendon Press, translation of Główne nurty marksizmu: rozwój (in...
  3. (archaic) National, i.e. ethnic and/or cultural, character or identity.
    • […]permit me to say that the Harranians were Arabs and that the Arabs in occupying Spain and Andalusia did not lose their nationality; they remained Arabs. […] The fact that they preserved their former religion, Sabaeanism, does not mean they should be considered foreign to the Arab nationality.1968, Sayyid Jamāl ad-Dīn, “Answer of Jamāl ad-Dīn to Renan”, in Nikki R. Keddie, translated by Nikki R. Keddie, An Islamic Response to Imperialism, University of California Press, →LCCN, page 185
  4. (archaic) Nationalism or patriotism.
    • ‘You are, to be sure, wonderfully free from that nationality: but so it happens, that you employ the only Scotch shoe-black in London.’1791, James Boswell, Life of Johnson, Oxford, published 2008, page 599
    Synonyms:
    nationalism, patriotic sentiment, patriotism
  5. (obsolete) Political existence, independence or unity as a national entity.

Phrases with nationalities

Questions about nationalities

What is nationalities the plural of?
Nationalities is the plural of nationality.

Words near nationalities in the dictionary

  1. nationalists
  2. nationalitarian
  3. nationalitarianism
  4. nationalitarianisms
  5. nationalitarians
  6. nationalities
  7. nationality
  8. nationality sign
  9. nationality signs
  10. nationalization
  11. nationalizations

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: nationalities (page history and authors); nationality (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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Cite this entry: “nationalities.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/nationalities. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.