Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. The state or quality of requiring much effort or immediate action.
- n. A pressing or urgent situation. See Synonyms at crisis.
- n. Urgent requirements; pressing needs. Often used in the plural.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. The state of being urgent; pressing need or demand; urgency: as, the exigency of the case or of business.
- n. A pressing necessity; an urgent case; any case which demands prompt action, supply, or remedy: as, in the present exigency no time is to be lost.
- n. A state of difficulty or want; a condition of distress or need.
- n. Command; requirement: as, the exigency of a writ. Synonyms Occurrence, Occasion, Exigency, Emergency, Crisis; pressure, strait, conjuncture, pass, pinch. An occasion is an occurrence, or separate event, usually involving considerations of importance, with the observance of a degree of ceremony; an exigency is an occasion of urgency and suddenness, where something helpful needs to be done at once; an emergency is more pressing and naturally less common than an exigency; a crisis is an emergency on the outcome of which everything depends. See
event .
Wiktionary
- n. The demands or requirements of a situation (usually plural.)
- n. An urgent situation.
- n. A situation requiring extreme effort or attention.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. The state of being exigent; urgent or exacting want; pressing necessity or distress; need; a case demanding immediate action, supply, or remedy.
WordNet 3.0
- n. a sudden unforeseen crisis (usually involving danger) that requires immediate action
- n. a pressing or urgent situation
Etymologies
- From the Middle French exigence from Late Latin exigentia "urgency" from Latin exigere "to demand" (Wiktionary)
Examples
“In the use of the word exigency, the full sense of its effect is perfectly understood.”
“However, in line with AAUP’s guidelines and outlined in the Tulane Faculty Handbook, termination of tenure due to financial exigency is “reviewed by the faculty of the division in which they hold appointment, then by the Senate Committee on Faculty Tenure, Freedom and Responsibility, with ultimate review of all controverted issues by the Tulane Board of Administrators.””
“But again, the question is not whether exigency was an important variable to the wartime Court: Of course it was.”
“I travel with a teeny tiny jackknife/scissors combo for just that kind of exigency, which I would like to have you know was CONFISCATED JUST TODAY AT CHICAGO O'HARE AIRPORT.”
“To deal with any kind of exigency, bomb blankets and disposal squads will be positioned on the network so that they can be called whenever required.”
“Another short-term solution to postal woes may be to invoke the "exigency" clause in postal law that would permit an increase in postage above the rate of inflation because of”
“… such narratives of crisis serve more than one category of reassurance: by repeatedly focusing anxiety on the fragility of the new nation, its ostensible vulnerability to every kind of exigency, the state's originating agency is periodically reinvoked and ratified, its access to wide-ranging instruments of power in the service of national protection continually consolidated.”
“The ongoing revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere are a stark reminder of the exigency involved.”
“The leads were allowed to be most heavyhearted — say, after having to take out a foe whose humanity was briefly glimpsed — but hard-heartedness was kept generally to the casting margins, or acknowledged under the cover of exigency.”
“If new difficulties arise, we must only put forth new Exertions and proportion our Efforts to the exigency of the times.”
Matthew Berry to challenge Jim Moran (D, VA-08). - Moe_Lane’s blog - RedState
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘exigency’.
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GRE Barrons Wordlist
A complete Barron's Wordlist for GRE preparation. Your online flashcard replacement.
abase, abash, abate, abbreviate, abdicate, aberrant, aberration, abet, abeyance, abhor, abject, abjure and 4087 more...
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GRE Barron's 800
zealot, wistful, welter, wary, whimsical, warranted, vortex, vivisection, volatile, vitiate, viscous, visage and 787 more...
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EN - eloquence in public speaking
Key words from "The Training of a Public Speaker" by Grenville Kleiser (New York and London, 1920)
beget, imago, approbation, orator, peroration, Cicero, eloquence, elocution, rhetoric, premeditate, plead, Isocrates and 264 more...
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Words build meanings from origins( et...
These come from gamma meditation ,I think.
discursive, exogenous, machinations, purportedly, sumptuous, congruity, cantankerous, incongruous, festoon, hessian, ratiocinative, stratigraphic and 2046 more...
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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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cicatrix
scar tissue
minatory, naira, Cluniac, embracive, prolix, hierophant, timorous, adduce, veracious, dysphoric, sang-froid, vitiate and 503 more...
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fav1
ostensibly, fait accompli, edification, machination, vamp, abstruse, ebullient, tantamount, reductio, asymptotic, ad hominem, syllogism and 15 more...
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big book gre
abase, abbess, abbey, abbot, abdicate, abdomen, abdominal, abduction, abed, aberration, abet, abeyance and 6691 more...
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Advanced Words: Part II
facetious, felicitous, grandiloquent, germane, repatriate, exigency, exculpate, etheral, fatuous, heterogeneous, hiatus, idiosyncrasy and 118 more...
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Good Words
fenestering, cetic, immanent, quickening, archetypal, shibboleth, soma, wetware, heritable, Apotheosis, halcyon, cellar door and 482 more...
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Words I Know
List of most of the words I've learned
garner, abase, abate, abdicate, abduct, aberration, abet, abhor, abide, abject, abjure, abnegation and 1046 more...
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New words
Words that are new to me.
autostrada, gimlet, clyster, gravida, skelped, nacreous, susurrus, intransigent, puissant, turbid, plangent, fungible and 99 more...
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ADW1
obdurate, obstinate, behest, injunction, enjoin, circumspect, ensconce, discursive, lugubrious, doleful, somber, ken and 2476 more...
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Revised GRE Wordlist_2013
Vocabulary building for my quest of GRE 2013
ephemeral, esoteric, rhetoric, censure, egregious, pittance, dupe, mulct, paucity, alacrity, maintain, laconic and 997 more...
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Vocab++
Words as I learn them.
fetid, mezzanine, hiatus, austerity, subliminal, resplendent, implacable, impugn, debase, exiguous, cirque, holster and 2538 more...
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Joshee Word List
gash, engross, entail, stoke, ode, vacillate, aspersion, asperity, clan, kith, prospect, nag and 229 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for exigency.

kingparton She asserts female right to a profession not because of financial exigency or family crisis, but out of sheer desire and for the sake of sheer power.
Cheri Larsen Hoeckley, "Anomalous Ownership" Nov 27, 2011