Dictionary

quintessentiality en · NOUN

Etymology

From quintessential + -ity.

Meanings

1. (uncountable) The quality of being quintessential.
   • The ability to rule, the power to stand alone and to swing the club, the power to take and, having taken, to keep, was the very quintessentiality of his existence. 1905, Arthur Wellington Brayley, Arthur Wilson Tarbell, Joseph Mitchell Chapple, National Magazine, Volume 22, Issue 6, Bostonian Publishing Company, Chapple Publishing Company, page 677:
   • Every corner therefore was crowded, save only that one box which, as in a microcosm, is wont to contain the very quintessentiality of the fashion and ton of London. 1835, Lady Sydney Morgan, The Princess; or, The Beguine, Volume 1, R. Bentley, pages 5-6:
   • We have heard so much about the sins of big business that we have come to regard little business as the quintessentiality of innocent martyrdom. 1915, The Los Angeles Times, The Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times Communications LLC, page 580:
   • It instigates, begins, leaves off, and then continues, rousiag to action the hearer’s innate need of an aim and an order and meaning in things. Its subtle gestures, its brief, sharp, delicate phrases, its quintessentiality, are like the thrusting open of doors into the interiors of the conscience, the opening of windows on long vistas, are like the breaking of light upon obscured memories and buried emotions. 1970, David Ewen, From Bach to Stravinsky: The History of music by Its Foremost Critics, AMS Press, page 300:
   • At all events, the spirit of these great fathers of the first philosophy was upon him, and Humbughausen was a concentrated quintessentiality of them all,—one, to whom dreaming was a natural condition; one who, while his external senses were proof against the rudest impressions, could do so much better without them, as to be intuitively conversant not only with all actual, but all possible existence. 1838, The New Monthly Magazine 1838-07: Volume 53, Issue 211, Open Court Publishing Company, page 304:
2. (countable) Something that is quintessential.

Forms