Word of the Day

: December 31, 2023

futurity

noun fyoo-TOOR-uh-tee

What It Means

Futurity is a formal, literary synonym of future meaning “time to come.” The plural form, futurities, can also refer to future events or prospects.

// The motivational speaker exhorted us to change the way we live today, rather than looking always toward some vague distant futurity.

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futurity in Context

“The 18th floor, two-room suite with a spacious balcony overlooking 27th Street has been transformed by the recent Yale grad, in a project aiming to broadly represent the values of the queer and creative community. ... Standard hotel whites are swapped for neon, patterned towels and bathrobes, with nods to science fiction and a theme of queer futurity continuous throughout the space.” — Melissa Kravitz Hoeffner, Forbes, 31 July 2023

Did You Know?

For a forward-looking word, futurity has quite the literate past. Its first known use comes from Act III of Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello, when the downtrodden Cassio, mystified about why Othello has turned against him, beseeches Desdemona to tell him whether his “offense be of such mortal kind / That nor my service past, nor present sorrows, / Nor purpos’d merit in futurity / Can ransom me into his love again.” Centuries later the Scottish writer Walter Scott wrote of events still in “the womb of futurity,” employing a phrase also used by James Fenimore Cooper, among others. Though still in use and very much useful, futurity tends to lend one’s speech or writing a lofty tone, so if the situation calls for something more down-to-earth, you may want to go back to [the] future.