Word of the Day

: July 11, 2018

nimiety

noun nih-MYE-uh-tee

What It Means

: excess, redundancy

nimiety in Context

As she organized the potluck lunch, Julie offered suggestions for dishes that were still needed so that we wouldn't end up with a dearth of salads or a nimiety of desserts.

"Like all good haunted houses, it hovers atop a hill surrounded by large gnarled oak trees. There are broken windows with little fragments in the jambs, like transparent teeth. There is an iron fence; a graveyard in the back; and a nimiety of ghosts." — Richard Bangs, The Huffington Post, 6 Dec. 2017

Did You Know?

There's no scarcity of English words for too much of a good thing—words like overkill, plethora, superfluity, surfeit, surplus, and preponderance, to name a few. In fact, you might just feel that nimiety itself is a bit superfluous. And it's true—English speakers have never found much need for it, though it has been part of our language for over 450 years. For reasons long forgot, we borrowed it from Late Latin nimietas, a noun taken, in turn, from the Latin adjective nimius, meaning "excessive." If nimiety appeals to you but you'd like it in adjective form look no further than its only English relative: nimious, also from nimius, means "excessive, extravagant," and is even rarer than nimiety.