malignity means the quality of being malign or malignant; badness, evilness, monstrosity, depravity, maliciousness. It carries an Arena rating of 1602, earned across 31 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, malignity ranks #3,074 of 17,124 for Most Sublime Words, #3,476 of 17,127 for Words That Escaped Their Books, #4,132 of 17,131 for Scariest Words, #4,747 of 17,128 for Most Ponderous Words.
Why “malignity” is a great word
MALIGNITY — [Noun] The quality or state of being intensely malevolent, wicked, or cancerous. From Middle English, via Middle French maligneté, from Latin malignitās ("ill will, malice"), from malignus ("wicked, malicious"). The humorous collective noun 'a malignity of goblins' was coined by David Malki in 2009. Unlike malice, which implies a specific desire to harm, or malevolence, which denotes a settled, active ill will, malignity suggests a deeper, inherent, and pervasive evil—a corruptive principle equally at home in a depraved soul or a metastasizing cell. It is the cold, systemic hatred that organizes a pogrom; the patient, cellular fire of a tumor; and the shadow not cast by any object but seeping from the walls themselves—a darkness not merely acted upon the world, but constitutive of it.
Etymology
From Middle English malignete, malignitee, malignyte, malyngnite, from Middle French maligneté, from Latin malignitās. By surface analysis, malign + -ity. * (a group of goblins): Coined by David Malki in the 30 October 2009 Wondermark webcomic strip “Supernatural Collective Nouns”.
noun
- The quality of being malign or malignant; badness, evilness, monstrosity, depravity, maliciousness.
- A non-benign cancer; a malignancy.e.g.“The absence of any histological sign of malignity in the primary tumor and in the metastases, as observed in our patient, is remarkable.” — 2005, R.L. Abada et al., “Multiple metastases of a mandibular ameloblastoma”, in (Please provide the book title or journal name):
- A group of goblins.e.g.“There was a whole malignity‡ of goblins up on the roof, but if you wanted your clacks to fly fast, you didn’t use the term out loud.” — 2013, Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam (Discworld; 40), London: Doubleday, →ISBN, page 31:
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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