bizarrity

English

Noun

bizarrity (countable and uncountable, plural bizarrities)

The quality of being bizarre.
- 1824, Cincinnatus Caledonius [pseudonym; John Gordon Barbour], Queries Connected with Christianity, Edinburgh: […] D. Webster, page 299:
  The bizarrity of many public “sayings and doings” can scarcely be outdone by the bizarrity of some of the queries.
- 1885 April, The American Journal of Insanity, volume XLI, Utica, N.Y., page 496:
  I do not kiss your hand, lest I might infest you with some of my bizarrity, but I make you a low courtesy, and I hope to see you again soon, under some new and interesting semblance.
- 1889, ““The Puffiad””, in Time, volume XIX, page 64:
  The former’s splendour gives a fine bizarrity, / The latter’s grace a charming regularity.
- 1896 February 8, A. J. Dawson, “Two Unimportant Events”, in To-Day: A Weekly Magazine-Journal, volume X, number 118, London, pages 1–4:
  In most [?] he was kind-hearted, and he prided himself, in the set he led, upon his artistic taste in the details of life, and upon what he called his “bizarrity” in all things. […] Even Wray, with his refined “bizarrity” and cultured, blasé life, felt a wave of almost overpowering tenderness, brush swiftly across his heart as he told Margaret, on one of those ideally beautiful nights, that he loved her. […] He seemed a shade less sprightly than of yore, and many people said there was not the same vim and energy about his work, or in the “bizarrity” of his ways, as there had been.
- 1899 September 8, Kenneth Herford, “Victor Hugo—A Side Light”, in The Detroit Free Press, volume 64, number 349, Detroit, Mich., page 4:
  The Hugo that lived was just a Frenchman—loving bizarrity.
- 1913, School and Home Education, page 10:
  But the schools have gone on the contrary assumption; they have stretched the ‘shorts’ on on the Procrustean bed of normality, have forced them into the straight-jacket of a ‘system,’ have classicized their freakish and Romantic diversities, have uniformized their bizarrities, or sought to do so, and have failed.
- 1920 October 22, “The Woman Of It! Over There!”, in Akron Evening Times, volume 28, number 346, Akron, Ohio, page two:
  Among other bewildering bizarr-ities I hear that whole families were seen costumed in cretonne!
- 1951, Transcript of Record: Supreme Court of the United States, October Term, 1951, No. 176, page 214:
  “Without psychosis” means that he doesn’t show any bizarrity of behavior as it is characterized in our definite medical classifications.
- 1958 July 17, John Lear, “A new attack on nervous disorders”, in The New Scientist, volume 4, number 87, page 430:
  Indeed, the childhood or early adult origin of many of these conditions turn the bizarrities into unrelieved tragedy.
- 2009, David J. Tenenbaum, Terry Devitt, The Why Files: The Science Behind the News, Penguin Books, →ISBN:
  But now, Venus Express, a European spaceship, is revealing enough bizarrities to keep a TV weather watcher babbling till dawn.

Synonyms