Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. The frailty of old age; senility.
- n. The quality or state of being perishable; impermanence.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A tendency to fall or decay; hence, the period of declining life; senility; feebleness; weakness.
- n. In Louisiana law, lapse; failure to take effect: as, the caducity of a will from the birth of a legitimate child to the testator after its date; the caducity of a legacy from the death of the legatee before that of the testator.
Wiktionary
- n. dotage or senility
- n. The state of being impermanent or transitory.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. Tendency to fall; the feebleness of old age; senility.
Etymologies
- French caducité, from caduc, frail, falling, from Latin cadūcus; see caducous.
Examples
“He answered the caducity of him having a successful foreign trip the way he should have.”
Obama at Convention for Journalists - The Caucus Blog - NYTimes.com
“The attitude that words may be discarded -- indeed, that words have caducity at all -- is not salubriously abstergent, but reflects an agrestic nisus that all cultivated English speakers must eschew.”
“Were I to conjecture, I should say that the whole will centre, before it is long, in Mr. Pitt and Co., the present being an heterogeneous jumble of youth and caducity, which cannot be efficient.”
Letters to his son on The Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman
“When you happen to see either Monsieur or Madame Perny, I beg you will give them this melancholic proof of my caducity, and tell them that the last time I went to see the boys, I carried the Michaelmas quarterage in my pocket; and when I was there I totally forgot it; but assure them, that”
Letters to his son on The Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman
“In literature, this eventual caducity is even more notorious.”
“But they wrought their awful romances of crime in lands where the sun of supreme civilization, through a gorgeous evening of Sybaritic luxury, was sinking, with red tints of revolution, into the night of anarchy and national caducity.”
“The emphatic affirmation of a supermundane, spiritual order of reality and the equally emphatic assertion of the caducity of things material fitted in with the essentially Christian contention that spiritual interests are supreme.”
“As for the labour and sorrow which his Majesty K (ing) D (avid) speaks of, I know of no age that is quite exempt from them, and have no fear of their being more severe in my caducity than they were in the flower of my age, when I had not more things to please me than I have now, although they might vary in their kind.”
George Selwyn His Letters and His Life
“But I regard myself, not as speaking to please Emerson's admirers, not as speaking to please myself; but rather, I repeat, as communing with Time and Nature concerning the productions of this beautiful and rare spirit, and as resigning what of him is by their unalterable decree touched with caducity, in order the better to mark and secure that in him which is immortal.”
“I do not speak of the ordinary caducity of language, in virtue of which every effusion of the human spirit is lodged in a body of death.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘caducity’.
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January 2012
bloviate, pastiche, apparat, facile, paroxysm, pique, bedfellow, pedigree, tutelage, protege, protégé, retroactive and 196 more...
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Greg's List
precarious, transient, evanescence, impermanence, fugacity, transitoriness, volatility, caducity, span, interregnum, effervescent, mine and 63 more...
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eg's list
lexicolony
nefandous, ineffable, ultracrepidate, haecceity, quiddity, noumenon, hypokeimenon, extemporaneous, theomastix, caducity, niddering, tellurian and 16 more...
mcgelligot The older I get the more I think I have a one way ticket on the train to CaduCity! Jan 29, 2009
gregmiller The infirmity or weakness of old age; senility Dec 23, 2008
eg impermanence Dec 11, 2008