Meanings
- futility; trifling talk or behaviour; drollery
In the poem "Among School Children" Yeats gives the nugacity of temporal life a bittersweet rendering.
1980, Carl A. Raschke, The Interruption of Eternity: Modern Gnosticism and the Origins of the New Religious Consciousness, page 1202 more examples
For the first time in his life of twenty-five years, Leigh Newcomber was seriously thinking of personal and practical matters; and this mental state being an untrained one, he jumped from impulse to impulse, and from reason to nugacity; and after a while reason and impulse became so commingled as to leave him in a bewildering maze of mental and moral incertitude.
1901, William Lee Howard, The Perverts, page 22We leave out of account,’ said Enderby, ‘as being too inexpensive for serious consideration, a pastel stole at two hundred pounds. That’s a frippery, a mere nugacity.’ He smiled sillily. ‘What,’ he asked, ‘can a poet do with no money, eh? How does a poet live?
1963, Anthony Burgess, Inside Mr Enderby
Origin
Cite this entry
nugacity. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/nugacity
“nugacity.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/nugacity. Accessed November 3, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “nugacity,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/nugacity.
Source: nugacity on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.