privity

plural privities

1. countableobsoleteuncountableA divine mystery; something known only to God, or revealed only in holy scriptures.First known use 12th–16th c.

   But yet there is a place that men clepe the school of God, where he was wont to teach his disciples, and told them the privities of heaven.

   1357, John Mandeville, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville

2. archaiccountableuncountablePrivacy, secrecy.First known use 13th c.

   Him oft and oft I askt in priuitie, / Of what loines and what lignage I did spring[…].

   1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book I, Canto IX”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC

3. countableobsoleteuncountableA private matter, a secret.First known use 14th–17th c.
4. archaiccountablein pluraluncountableThe genitals.First known use 14th c.

   Having ended the delights of nature, they were wont to wipe their privities [translating catze] with perfumed wooll.

   1603, Michel de Montaigne, chapter 49, in John Florio, transl., The Essayes […], book I, London: […] Val[entine] Simmes for Edward Blount […], →OCLC

5. countableuncountablelawA relationship between parties seen as being a result of their mutual interest or participation in a given transaction, e.g. contract, estate, etc.First known use 16th c.

   There is no privity, (as the lawyers say),—that is, no mutual recognition, consent and agreement—between those who take these oaths, and any other persons.

   1870, Lysander Spooner, No Treason, Number 6, page 32

6. countableuncountableThe fact of being privy to something; knowledge, compliance.First known use 16th c.

   But this acknowledgement was made without the privity of his wife, whose vicious aversion he was obliged, in appearance, to adopt.

   1751, [Tobias] Smollett, chapter 14, in The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle […], volume I, London: Harrison and Co., […], →OCLC

   1 more example

   This episode in her life, above all other things, was most cruelly suggestive to him, as possibly involving his father in the privity to a thing, at which Pierre’s inmost soul fainted with amazement and abhorrence.

   1852, Herman Melville, Pierre; or The Ambiguities