infelicity · noun — the condition of being infelicitous. It carries an Arena rating of 1560, earned across 11 head-to-head judged battles.
Definition from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, infelicity ranks #2,914 of 17,176 for Most Incisive Words, #3,898 of 17,188 for Words That Escaped Their Books, #4,267 of 17,205 for The Improbable, #6,054 of 17,129 for Most Ponderous Words.
Why “infelicity” is a great word
The quality of being inapt or inappropriate, especially in expression. From the Latin prefix in- ("not") and fēlīcitās ("happiness, good fortune"), from fēlīx ("happy, fortunate"). First attested in English in the late 14th century. Unlike a solecism, which is a breach of grammatical or social rules, or a malapropism, which is a comic confusion of similar-sounding words, an infelicity is a subtler dissonance—an utterance that is technically sound yet profoundly off-key. It is the congratulatory remark at a funeral, the jarringly casual word in a formal address, or the perfect grammatical sentence that somehow chills the room: a small, quiet monument to the distance between what is said and what is meant.
❧ Essay by Lexicurio’s AI · definition, etymology & citations from published sources
Etymology
From in- + felicity, from Latin infelicitas.
noun
- The condition of being infelicitous.e.g.“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 […]” — 2007, Andrew Zurcher, Spenser's legal language: law and poetry in early modern England, page 4:
- Something that is infelicitous or inappropriatee.g.“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.” — 2007 October 24, Jeffrey Alan Barrett, “Approximate Truth and Descriptive Nesting”, in Erkenntnis, volume 68, number 2, →DOI:
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Words closest in meaning
By meaning, not spelling — each word's AI semantic fingerprint, nearest first.