Archaicity

//ɑː(ɹ)keɪˈɪsɪti// noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The quality of being archaic. uncountable

    "Most importantly perhaps, it is evident that the impression of archaicity which any reader will experience on reading The Lord of the Rings is partly due to three simple lexical causes: the “overuse” of words borrowed from nineteenth-century fiction (e.g. yonder, journey [v], topmost), the avoidance of words associated with the modern world and the comparatively dense use of new coinages, unusual grammatical patterns, rare or obsolescent words."

Example

More examples

"Most importantly perhaps, it is evident that the impression of archaicity which any reader will experience on reading The Lord of the Rings is partly due to three simple lexical causes: the “overuse” of words borrowed from nineteenth-century fiction (e.g. yonder, journey [v], topmost), the avoidance of words associated with the modern world and the comparatively dense use of new coinages, unusual grammatical patterns, rare or obsolescent words."

Etymology

From archaic + -ity.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.