relevancy

English

Etymology

From relevant +‎ -ancy.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈɹɛlɪvənsi/
• Hyphenation: rel‧e‧van‧cy

Noun

relevancy (countable and uncountable, plural relevancies)

1. (law, Scotland) Sufficiency (of a statement, claim etc.) to carry weight in law; legal pertinence. [from 16th c.]
2. (uncountable) The degree to which a thing is relevant; relevance, applicability. [from 17th c.]
   • 1842, Edgar Allan Poe, The Myster of Marie Rogêt:

     It is the malpractice of the courts to confine evidence and discussion to the bounds of apparent relevancy.

3. (countable) A relevant thing. [from 19th c.]
   • 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.

Usage notes

• In contemporary usage relevance is about 20 times more common in the US (COCA) and about 50 times more common in the UK (BNC) than relevancy.

Antonyms

• irrelevancy

Related terms

• relevant
• relevance

Translations

relevance — see relevance

the degrees to which a thing is relevant

• Finnish: relevanttius, asiaankuuluvuus
• French: pertinence (fr) f

Further reading

• “relevancy”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC.