Infelicity
noun ·Moderate ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 The condition of being infelicitous. uncountable
"The infelicity of this shift of subject only becomes apparent, again retrospectively, in line eight, directly after the reader's encounter with yet another inscrutable Spenserism […]"
- 2 inappropriate and unpleasing manner or style (especially manner or style of expression) wordnet
- 3 Something that is infelicitous or inappropriate countable
"Returning to our own epistemic situation, we do not know the sense in which quantum mechanics and relativity will be taken to be approximately true after their descriptive infelicities are addressed."
Example
More examples"The infelicity of this shift of subject only becomes apparent, again retrospectively, in line eight, directly after the reader's encounter with yet another inscrutable Spenserism […]"
Etymology
From in- + felicity, from Latin infelicitas.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.