Latinity

From Latin Latīnitās, from Latin Latīnus (“Latin”).

Latinity (countable and uncountable, plural Latinities)

1. (uncountable, countable) The quality of a particular person's Latin speech or writing; the Latin language, as an area of study or interest.
   • 1834, Mark Napier, chapter III, in Memoirs of John Napier of Merchiston, His Lineage, Life, and Times, with a History of the Invention of Logarithms, Edinburgh: William Blackwood; London: Thomas Cadell, page 116:

     The banns being published, the next difficulty was to find a bishop who would bless them. One bishop was found, says Buchanan with the severest point of his elegant Latinity, one, the Bishop of Orkney, who preferred the smiles of a court to the light of truth, while others declined the task, and pointed out the unhallowed nature of nuptials with him who had already two spouses alive, and had lately obtained himself to be repudiated by a third on the ground of his own adultery.

   • 1886 May 1 – July 31, Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped, being Memoirs of the Adventures of David Balfour in the Year 1751: , London; Paris: Cassell & Company, published 1886, →OCLC:

     “Well, well,” said the lawyer, when I had quite done, “this is a great epic, a great Odyssey of yours. You must tell it, sir, in a sound Latinity when your scholarship is riper; or in English if you please, though for my part I prefer the stronger tongue. […]

   • 1886 October – 1887 January, H[enry] Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., published 1887, →OCLC:

     Indeed his rendering is so excellent an example of mediæval learning and latinity that, even at the risk of sating the learned reader with too many antiquities, I have made up my mind to give it in fac-simile, together with an expanded version for the benefit of those who find the contractions troublesome.

   • 2012, Barbara Newman, “Ailments of the Tongue”, in London Review of Books, volume 34, number 6:

     Girls might infiltrate the clubhouse but men alone remain the teachers and theorists of Latinity.

2. (uncountable) Latin character
3. (uncountable) Latin literature considered as a whole
4. (countable) A Latinism

• Latinhood
• Latinness