fiercity

From fierce +‎ -ity.

fiercity (uncountable)

1. The quality of being fierce.
   • 1844, John James Margesson, Early Poems, page 17:

     For, though the winds had sunk to rest, / There still did lurk within the breast / Of ocean’s vast profundity / The dying spark, that still might be / With all its former fiercity / Relit, like the dying ashes / Of the fire that once did burn, / Still now sends forth some dying flash / Whose former strength might soon return, / If winds upon its embers blew / The latent sparks to life anew: […]

   • 1902, Carolyn Wells, “The Pot of Painted Butter”, in Abeniki Caldwell: A Burlesque Historical Novel, New York, N.Y.: Robert Howard Russell, page 77:

     The strokes of steel rang out between the crashing thunderbolts, and the blade-struck sparks rivalled in fiercity the lightning’s livid glare.

   • 1921 March 25, Salina Evening Journal, volume 36, number 72, Salina, Kan., page one:

     The fiercity of the fighting may be judged from the fact that the railroad station changed hands twice in the twenty minutes preceding the filing of this dispatch.

   • 1968 December 21, Janice MacWhirter, “Christmas season filled halls of MHS”, in Daily News-Post, volume 60, number 88, Monrovia, Calif., page 12:

     At Christmas-time old grudges seem to have a tendency to lessen in fiercity—drab, everyday responsibilities suddenly have a gayer glow—you begin to look forward to each new day, for each day closer to the 25th seems to bring each man closer to his neighbor, as warmth and affection run rampant.

   • 1968 December 29, Ernie Mills, “Vietnam Visit …: ‘… Those Who Serve’”, in New Mexican, 120th year, number 29, Santa Fe, N.M., page A5:

     It is servicemen like Henry Clay of Clovis who can attest to the fiercity of the fighting that went into the Meade River Operation.

   • 1975 April 17, Mr. Ed, “From The Horse’s Mouth”, in The Edgar Sun, volume 70, number 16, Edgar, Neb., page 2:

     When she went to the big room with her father, she was frightened by the fiercity of the storm and the way the driving snow blotted out everything.

   • 1976 July 4, “First doctors often last hope of the sick”, in Denton Record-Chronicle, 73rd year, number 289, Denton, Tex., page 18I:

     They lost many a fight to the often mysterious fiercity of consumption, typhoid fever, pneumonia, dropsy and other sicknesses.

   • 2011, Vladimir Sorokin, “23,000”, in Jamey Gambrell, transl., Ice Trilogy, New York, N.Y.: New York Review Books, →ISBN, page 635:

     I believed Mother Earth. Loved her stronger than myself. Relied on her fiercity.

   • 2013, Alison MacLeod, Unexploded, Hamish Hamilton, →ISBN, page 39:

     Suddenly she’d turned into a fragile thing in their bed, a bone-china cup of a woman, a woman who wouldn’t mend. Not properly. He would never crush her against him again. The fiercity would go out of his love.

• fierceness