Dictionary

peregrinity en · NOUN

Etymology

From peregrine + -ity, from Latin peregrīnitās. Compare French pérégrinité.

Meanings

1. (countable, uncountable) The quality of being foreign or strange.
   • Peregrinity! peregrinity! come back, Imgar, and conduct us down in Hindoodum, where alligators thrive. 1890, Frederick Alanson Randle, Imgar: A Story of India, page 93:
   • The new xenophobia is thus a collective psychological response to peregrinity. 2010, Bryan S. Turner, Vulnerability and Human Rights, page 134:
   • It will be correct, that is, free from faults, if the tongue bee loose, articulate, sweet, and polite: that is, in which no tone of rusticity or peregrinity is discoverable. 1774, J. Patsall Quintilian, Quintilian's Institutes of the Orator: In Twelve Books, page 315:
   • The future translator is exhorted to consult his author's manner, to copy his air and gesture, and to preserve the 'very fashion, simple or splendid, of his garb, with the exception only of such arts of it, as are stamped with idiotism or with peregrinity.' 1808, Tobias Smollett, The Critical Review: Or, Annals of Literature - Volume 12, page 216:
   • somewhat of a peregrinity in their dialect 1785, James Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D:
   • This pert censor has not the presumption to quarrel with the neutralizing of foreign words, the discreet adoption of which adds opulence and ornament to our language, but (as she loves to sin in the very act of censure, and as the greatest rogue always turns King's evidence) she laments the peregrinity of style, the foreign fabrication of sentences, which is wearing away the beauty, diluting the spirit, and diminishing the force of our tongue. 1834, William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More, page 146:
2. (countable, historical, uncountable) The status of being a non-citizen in Ancient Rome.
   • There were different grades of peregrinity, however, as socii in general; socii nominis Latini; dedititii; yet they could attain to individual privileges, as, for instance, those of connubium (Liv. xxxi . 31.). 1836, Thomas Swinburne Carr, A Manual of Roman Antiquities, page 175:
   • […] similar in character is the law introduced by the consuls Crassus and Scaevola forbidding a non-citizen to pose as a citizen—such a person was said to be accused of peregrinity. 1912, Balthazar Ayala, John Westlake, Balthazaris Ayalae, page 240:
   • Eucrates mentioned in the next line, was an Athenian general, noted for corrupt practices, treachery, and peregrinity. 1837, The Comedies of Aristophanes, page 68:
3. (countable, uncountable) Travel; wandering.
   • The problems of distribution barriers, peregrinity, regional differences of fauna, etc. are observed only in the case of earthworms, but he did note Lake Baikal as a nest of numerous endemic aquatic oligochaetes. 2012, Ralph O. Brinkhurst, Aquatic Oligochaete Biology, page 56:
   • A new removal, what we call 'his third peregrinity,' had to be decided on; and it was resolved that Rome should be the goal of it[.] 1851, Thomas Carlyle, The Life of John Sterling, London: Chapman and Hall, […], →OCLC:
   • Thus in this case [of peregrinity] one must attend only to whether the planet lies in the sign of a friend or an enemy, a topic that we treated in Book 15, chapter 14 of htis volume. 2004, J-B Morin, Astrologia Gallica Book Eighteen, page 28:
   • Upon reviewing this unbalanced itinerary, I can only conclude that I have been suffering from a bad case of peregrinity (or as I should perhaps refer to it: peregrinosis) . 1993, Robert K. Merton, On the Shoulders of Giants, page 232:
   • For the literature of early modern Europe is a store-house or treasure trove of tales of danger survived, of encounters between pilgrim travelers whom Rabelais's Panurge terms "lovers of peregrinity, whose too much curiosity has thrown them upon adventures,” and others who seek to make those pilgrims into human, bacon-basted kebabs, attack them on the desert road, or throw them into prison, or slavery, or worse. 2009, Palmira Brummett, The ‘Book’ of Travels, page 212:

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