Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The state of being wild or untamed.
- noun The state of being savage; ferocity.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun Wildness; savageness; cruelty.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun obsolete Wildness; savageness; fierceness.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun The quality or fact of being
wild or in a wild state;wildness ,brutishness .
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
Support
Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word ferity.
Examples
-
He finds wildness not only in the woods, but in such literary works as Hamlet and the Iliad; and even in certain forms of society: “The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet”
Transcendentalism Goodman, Russell 2008
-
To burn the bones of the king of Edom for lime, + seems no irrational ferity; but to drink of the ashes of dead relations, + a passionate prodigality.
-
The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet.
Walking 1969
-
The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet.
Harvard Classics Volume 28 Essays English and American Various
-
To burn the bones of the King of Edom for lime seems no irrational ferity: but to store the back volumes of Mr Bottomleys John Bull a passionate prodigality.
XI. Of Selection 1920
-
The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet.
Walking 1914
-
The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet.
Walking [1862] 1909
-
Edom for lime seems no irrational ferity: but to store the back volumes of Mr Bottomley's "John Bull" a passionate prodigality. '
On The Art of Reading Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch 1903
-
Its wild, demoniac laughter awakens the echoes on the solitary lakes, and its ferity and hardiness are kindred to those robust spirits.
Birds and Poets : with Other Papers John Burroughs 1879
-
Especially when I read of the adventures of Russian and Polish exiles in Siberia -- men of aristocratic lineage wandering amid snow and arctic cold, sleeping on rocks or in hollow trees, and holding their own, empty-handed, against hunger and frost and their fiercer brute embodiments do I recognize a hardihood and a ferity whose wet-nurse, ages back, may well have been this gray slut of the woods.
Winter Sunshine John Burroughs 1879
qms commented on the word ferity
Though wise men maintain it’s a verity
That rudeness and insult are ferity,
With those who won’t see
What’s plain villainy
The sages permit some asperity.
August 25, 2018