irrelevancy
Contents
EnglishEdit
EtymologyEdit
ir- + relevancy or irrelevant + -cy
NounEdit
irrelevancy (countable and uncountable, plural irrelevancies)
- (uncountable) The quality of being irrelevant or inapplicable; lack of pertinence or connection.
- (countable) A thing that is irrelevant—having no bearing on the subject of discussion.
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1895, Mark Twain, Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences:
- 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.
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SynonymsEdit
AntonymsEdit
TranslationsEdit
the quality of being irrelevant or inapplicable
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a thing that is irrelevant
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- The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables, removing any numbers. Numbers do not necessarily match those in definitions. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout#Translations.
Translations to be checked
ReferencesEdit
- irrelevancy in The Century Dictionary, The Century Co., New York, 1911