PROCLIVITY

Pronunciation (US):

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does proclivity mean? 

• PROCLIVITY (noun)
  The noun PROCLIVITY has 1 sense:

1. a natural inclination

  Familiarity information: PROCLIVITY used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• PROCLIVITY (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A natural inclination

Classified under:

Nouns denoting cognitive processes and contents

Synonyms:

leaning; proclivity; propensity

Context example:

he has a proclivity for exaggeration

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

disposition; inclination; tendency (an attitude of mind especially one that favors one alternative over others)

 Context examples 

In spite of their cunning philosophy and of their antlike proclivities for cooperation, Nature rejected them for the exceptional man.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

"What have you done anyway that a two-legged other animal should come along, break you to harness, curb all your natural proclivities, and make slave- beasts out of you?"

(Love of Life and Other Stories, by Jack London)

As its name suggests, this breed has a proclivity for cotton in its nesting, and is a natural Hanta viral reservoir.

(Cotton Rat, NCI Thesaurus)

And those who do know, whisper that the hunters, while excellent shots, were so notorious for their quarrelsome and rascally proclivities that they could not sign on any decent schooner.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

In spite of their Unitarian proclivities and their masks of conservative broadmindedness, they were two generations behind interpretative science: their mental processes were mediaeval, while their thinking on the ultimate data of existence and of the universe struck him as the same metaphysical method that was as young as the youngest race, as old as the cave-man, and older—the same that moved the first Pleistocene ape-man to fear the dark; that moved the first hasty Hebrew savage to incarnate Eve from Adam's rib; that moved Descartes to build an idealistic system of the universe out of the projections of his own puny ego; and that moved the famous British ecclesiastic to denounce evolution in satire so scathing as to win immediate applause and leave his name a notorious scrawl on the page of history.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)