precocity

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English

Etymology

From French précocité.

Pronunciation

  • IPA(key): /pɹəˈkɒsɪti/
  • Audio (US):(file)
  • Rhymes: -ɒsɪti

Noun

precocity (countable and uncountable, plural precocities)

  1. The state of being precocious.
    • 1817 William Wirt, Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry, New York: M'elrath, Bangs & Co., 1834, Section I, pp. 23-4,
      I cannot learn that he gave in his youth, any evidence of that precocity which sometimes distinguishes uncommon genius.
    • 1847 January – 1848 July, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter 2, in Vanity Fair , London: Bradbury and Evans , published 1848, →OCLC:
      By the side of many tall and bouncing young ladies in the establishment, Rebecca Sharp looked like a child. But she had the dismal precocity of poverty.
    • 1924, Herman Melville, chapter 15, in Billy Budd‎, London: Constable & Co.:
      It was as if his precocity of crookedness (and every vulgar villain is precocious) had for once deceived him, and the man he had sought to entrap as a simpleton had, through his very simplicity, ignominiously baffled him.
    • 1946, Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement of Volumes I-VI by D.C. Somervell, Oxford University Press, Chapter XII, p. 242,
      Anna Comnena, the Byzantine princess turned historian, sees our eleventh-century forebears in just this light, as appears in the mixture of horror with contempt which is her reaction to the mechanical ingenuity of the Crusaders' cross-bow, a Western novelty of her day which—with the characteristic precocity of lethal inventions—preceded by several centuries the invention of clockwork
    • 1964, William Anderson, Man's Quest for Knowledge: The Study and Teaching of Politics in Ancient Times‎, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Epilogue, p. 329:
      How can we explain the relative precocity in political studies that the Greeks demonstrated in contrast to the backwardness of other early peoples?
    • 1999, Leonard Pinsky, Robert P. Erickson, R. Neil Schimke, chapter 15, in Genetic Disorders of Human Sexual Development, Oxford University Press, page 314:
      Short stature persists into adult life but puberty is usually normal, although sexual precocity has been seen […]
    • 2024 (October 20th) The Simpsons season 36 episode 3 "Desperately Seeking Lisa"
      Yes, she's truly a special young person, just brimming with precocity. In fact, I was thinking she might be a good fit for the Horace Frick Academy.
    Synonym: precociousness

Translations

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