Definitions
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. The state or quality of being mutable. The quality of being subject to change or alteration in either form, state, or essential qualities.
- n. Changeableness, as of mind, disposition, or will; inconstancy; instability: as, the mutability of opinion or purpose.
Wiktionary
- n. The quality or state of being mutable.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. The quality of being mutable, or subject to change or alteration, either in form, state, or essential character; susceptibility of change; changeableness; inconstancy; variation.
WordNet 3.0
- n. the quality of being capable of mutation
Etymologies
- mutable + -ity (Wiktionary)
Examples
“I wish I could freeze frame them, but their mutability is their poignant charm.”
“Steadfastness in mutability, that is the common need, a Rock of Ages.”
“Politic as it is to document this kind of manmade instability, however, Shapcott's poems temper their more urgent observations with the knowledge that both constancy and change are, so to speak, constructs of the human imagination, and "mutability" itself only a word.”
“I guess 'mutability' is the right word for it all.”
The Guardian: Jo Shapcott: I'm not someone chasing her own ambulance
“To me, the most telling evidence of our "mutability" comes from those LGBT people who change even when there is little or no external duress.”
Patricia Nell Warren: Civil Rights for Gays: Does "Immutable" Really Describe Us?
“So too with a tree, which guarantees its immortality by flourishing, generating seed, and dying, so that the idea of a tree will be perpetuated by what Edmund Spenser calls 'mutability'.”
Shakespeare
“Nostalgia for an unchanging and primary language — and as late as 1760 Samuel Johnson was complaining of the "mutability" of human speech — partly explains why the major projects of premodern philology were normative grammar and etymology intended to derive European words from their divinely given Hebrew "originals.”
“But the word 'mutability' means change - and sometimes, there at the edges of it, there is twinkling green.'”
Telegraph.co.uk - Telegraph online, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph
“To determine the generalizability of this kind of mutability 'switching' among a wider range of bacteria, we examined the distribution of tandem repeats within MMR genes in over 100 bacterial species and found that multiple genetic switches might exist in these bacteria and may spontaneously modulate bacterial mutability during evolution.”
“When the period of "mutability" occurs, unexpected forms spring forth in a great number of different directions. [”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘mutability’.
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SCIE - statistics
Abbe-Helmert crit..., a priori probability, alphabet, total correlation, three-dimensional..., theoretical frequ..., time reversal test, three-series theorem, theoretical variable, tetrachoric corre..., absolutely unbias..., absolute error and 4171 more...
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worda
presumptuous, sanitize, sterile, drowsy, regicide, predilection, minutia, lascivious, hagiography, porous, pusillanimous, punctillious and 6 more...
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Words from Moby Dick
frigate, presumptuous, genteel, succor, hearthstone, gentry, factitious, bilious, insurgent, portent, enervate, genuflect and 303 more...
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Adverbia
A long list of adverbs, beginning with full-drive. Someone had to list them. This list in continued in the list More Adverbia.
Read some sniping and some informative commentary about a...full-drive, portentously, unlawfully, legally, heterogeneously, consumingly, clancularly, inconsolably, prepositionally, retrogressively, symptomatically, decrepitly and 2460 more...
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OED word of the Day
Just like it says
majority, plasm, apal, statin, legerdemain, leap year, daffodil, maternal, key worker, jojoba, skelf, pose and 101 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for mutability.
travismcdermott a1420 LYDGATE Troyyes Bk. (Augustus A.4) I. 1859 Thei seyn that chawng and mutabilite Appropred ben to femynyte. Jul 15, 2008