Word.ws English Dictionary

nugacity

nugacity noun: futility; trifling talk or behaviour; drollery.

Noun

nugacity

  1. futility; trifling talk or behaviour; drollery
    • For the first time in his life of twenty-five years, Leigh Newcomber was seriously thinking of personal and practical matters; and this mental state being an untrained one, he jumped from impulse to impulse, and from reason to nugacity; and after a while reason and impulse became so commingled as...1901, William Lee Howard, The Perverts, page 22
    • We leave out of account,’ said Enderby, ‘as being too inexpensive for serious consideration, a pastel stole at two hundred pounds. That’s a frippery, a mere nugacity.’ He smiled sillily. ‘What,’ he asked, ‘can a poet do with no money, eh? How does a poet live?1963, Anthony Burgess, Inside Mr Enderby

Origin of nugacity

From Latin nūgācitās (“trifling”), from nūgāx, -itās. Further from nūgor, from nūgae.

Questions about nugacity

What does nugacity mean?
Nugacity means futility; trifling talk or behaviour; drollery.
What part of speech is nugacity?
Nugacity is a noun.

Words near nugacity in the dictionary

  1. nuffink
  2. nuffy
  3. nug
  4. Nug Nug
  5. nugacious
  6. nugacity
  7. Nugara
  8. nugation
  9. nugations
  10. nugatorily
  11. nugatoriness

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: nugacity (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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