Dictionary

relevancy en · NOUN

Pronunciation

• /ˈɹɛlɪvənsi/
• (Southern-England) audio

Etymology

From relevant + -cy.

Meanings

1. (Scotland, countable, uncountable) Sufficiency (of a statement, claim etc.) to carry weight in law; legal pertinence.
2. (uncountable) The degree to which a thing is relevant; relevance, applicability.
   • It is the malpractice of the courts to confine evidence and discussion to the bounds of apparent relevancy. 1842, Edgar Allan Poe, The Myster of Marie Rogêt:
3. (countable) A relevant thing.
   • To believe that such talk really ever came out of people's mouths would be to believe that there was a time when time was of no value to a person who thought he had something to say; when it was the custom to spread a two-minute remark out to ten; when a man's mouth was a rolling-mill, and busied itself all day long in turning four-foot pigs of thought into thirty-foot bars of conversational railroad iron by attenuation; when subjects were seldom faithfully stuck to, but the talk wandered all around and arrived nowhere; when conversations consisted mainly of irrelevancies, with here and there a relevancy, a relevancy with an embarrassed look, as not being able to explain how it got there. 1895, Mark Twain, Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences:

Forms

Antonyms

irrelevancy

Relateds

relevance · relevant

Translations (5)

pl ważność (the degrees to which a thing is relevant) · fi relevanttius (the degrees to which a thing is relevant) · fi asiaankuuluvuus (the degrees to which a thing is relevant) · fr pertinence (the degrees to which a thing is relevant) · pl znaczenie (the degrees to which a thing is relevant)