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OneKitly

rarity

nounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈɹɛəɹəti//
  • United Kingdom//ˈɹɛːɹətɪj//
  • //ˈɹeɹəti//
  • //ˈɹɛɹəti//

A measure of the scarcity of an object.

noun

  1. 1

    A measure of the scarcity of an object.

  2. 2

    Thinness; the property of having low density

    Only the increasing rarity bothered him, and he thought that perhaps it was this which had turned the heads of other travellers and excited those absurd tales of night-gaunts whereby they explained the loss of such climbers as fell from these perilous paths.

  3. 3

    A rare object.

    Plant breeding is always a numbers game.[…]In addition, we are looking for rare alleles, so the more plants we try, the better. These rarities may be new mutations, or they can be existing ones that are neutral—or are even selected against—in a wild population. A good example is mutations that disrupt seed dispersal, leaving the seeds on the heads long after they are ripe.

Etymology

From rare + -ity, borrowed from Middle French rarité, from Latin rāritās; compare French rareté. See also rare.

Forms

plural
rarities
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).