14 abstract nouns we need to bring back

Fiercety, seriosity, debonairity...

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English has a few suffixes that can make abstract nouns out of adjectives. There's the relatively rare –cy, which turns fluent into fluency and idiot into idiocy, and there's the more common –ty or –ity that gives us certainty, subtlety, absurdity and the like. The only one that is truly productive, however, able to make a noun out of almost anything in English, is –ness. We can talk about hunky-doryness, pumped-upness or even lolwhutness without too much awkwardness. In the past couple of decades the –ty ending has acquired a certain amount of productivity in words like bogosity or awesomosity, but the productive use of –ty has a more humorous effect than –ness, which has to do with the fact that –ty comes to English through Latin and French influence and carries overtones of, shall we say, pretentiosity, ostentatiosity, and ridiculosity.

These –ty coinages have a slangy, modern ring to them but English speakers have actually been trying to make –ty happen for centuries. There are a number of old abstract nouns in the Oxford English Dictionary that, for whatever reason, and tragically, became obsolete. Here are 14 of them we need to bring back.

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Arika Okrent

Arika Okrent is editor-at-large at TheWeek.com and a frequent contributor to Mental Floss. She is the author of In the Land of Invented Languages, a history of the attempt to build a better language. She holds a doctorate in linguistics and a first-level certification in Klingon. Follow her on Twitter.