ENGLISH DICTIONARY

Oddity

Definition, Meaning & Examples

Pronunciation /ˈɒdɪti/ · Part of speech noun

Quick meaning: Oddity is a noun meaning (countable) An odd or strange thing or opinion.

Meaning

(countable) An odd or strange thing or opinion.

More Meanings

  1. (countable) A strange person; an oddball.
  2. (uncountable) Strangeness.

Example Sentences

An Avonside 0-4-4T with outside cylinders, bought by the S.M.A. in 1882 and scrapped in 1892 as a dismal failure, was one of the motive power oddities (some of them mortgaged).
The thing was unprecedented in his experience, and probably he wondered in his equine way at the eccentricities of the human race, and questioned whether oddity might not be merging into insanity in his master’s case.
Fête succeeded fête in honour of the arrival of Christina of Sweden, who seemed to communicate her own reckless love of novelty to the then somewhat staid French court. Claim your privileges as an oddity, and even you yourself will be astonished at their extent.
In the old days, to my commonplace and unobserving mind, he gave no evidences of genius whatsoever. He never read me any of his manuscripts, […], and therefore my lack of detection of his promise may in some degree be pardoned. But he had then none of the oddities and mannerisms which I hold to be inseparable from genius, and which struck my attention in after days when I came in contact with the Celebrity.

Word Forms

Synonyms for oddity

Depending on context, synonyms include irregularity, outlier, aberrant, abnormality, anomaly, deviance.

Related Words

Related dictionary entries include oddness, quirkiness, quirk, peculiarity, curio, rarity.

Related Dictionary Tools

Sources & Attribution

FreeDictionaryAPI.com / Wiktionary · Original source · CC BY-SA 4.0

Dictionary data is provided by FreeDictionaryAPI.com and sourced from Wiktionary under its stated license.