PERVERSITY

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

IPA (US):

 Dictionary entry overview: What does perversity mean? 

• PERVERSITY (noun)
  The noun PERVERSITY has 2 senses:

1. deliberate and stubborn unruliness and resistance to guidance or discipline

2. deliberately deviating from what is good

  Familiarity information: PERVERSITY used as a noun is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• PERVERSITY (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Deliberate and stubborn unruliness and resistance to guidance or discipline

Classified under:

Nouns denoting attributes of people and objects

Synonyms:

contrariness; perverseness; perversity

Hypernyms ("perversity" is a kind of...):

fractiousness; unruliness; wilfulness; willfulness (the trait of being prone to disobedience and lack of discipline)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "perversity"):

cussedness; orneriness (meanspirited disagreeable contrariness)

Derivation:

perverse (resistant to guidance or discipline)

Sense 2

Meaning:

Deliberately deviating from what is good

Classified under:

Nouns denoting attributes of people and objects

Synonyms:

perverseness; perversity

Context example:

there will always be a few people who, through macho perversity, gain satisfaction from bullying and terrorism

Hypernyms ("perversity" is a kind of...):

evil; evilness (the quality of being morally wrong in principle or practice)

Derivation:

perverse (deviating from what is considered moral or right or proper or good)

 Context examples 

This girl had always been the favourite of her father, but through a strange perversity, her mother could not endure her, and after the death of M. Moritz, treated her very ill.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

And what a distortion in your judgment, what a perversity in your ideas, is proved by your conduct!

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

The best of us have a spice of perversity in us, especially when we are young and in love.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

Inclination as well as perversity made the decision easy, and being already much excited, Meg opposed the old lady with unusual spirit.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

As I walked by his side homeward, I read well in his iron silence all he felt towards me: the disappointment of an austere and despotic nature, which has met resistance where it expected submission—the disapprobation of a cool, inflexible judgment, which has detected in another feelings and views in which it has no power to sympathise: in short, as a man, he would have wished to coerce me into obedience: it was only as a sincere Christian he bore so patiently with my perversity, and allowed so long a space for reflection and repentance.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

You shall be commander of the expedition, and I'll obey blindly, will that satisfy you? said Jo, with a sudden change from perversity to lamblike submission.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)