PROFUNDITY

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does profundity mean? 

• PROFUNDITY (noun)
  The noun PROFUNDITY has 4 senses:

1. wisdom that is recondite and abstruse and profound

2. intellectual depth; penetrating knowledge; keen insight; etc

3. the intellectual ability to penetrate deeply into ideas

4. the quality of being physically deep

  Familiarity information: PROFUNDITY used as a noun is uncommon.

 Dictionary entry details 

• PROFUNDITY (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Wisdom that is recondite and abstruse and profound

Classified under:

Nouns denoting cognitive processes and contents

Synonyms:

abstruseness; abstrusity; profoundness; profundity; reconditeness

Context example:

the anthropologist was impressed by the reconditeness of the native proverbs

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

wisdom (accumulated knowledge or erudition or enlightenment)

Derivation:

profound (far-reaching and thoroughgoing in effect especially on the nature of something)

Sense 2

Meaning:

Intellectual depth; penetrating knowledge; keen insight; etc

Classified under:

Nouns denoting attributes of people and objects

Synonyms:

profoundness; profundity

Context example:

the profoundness of the silence

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

depth (degree of psychological or intellectual profundity)

Antonym:

superficiality (lack of depth of knowledge or thought or feeling)

Derivation:

profound (showing intellectual penetration or emotional depth)

Sense 3

Meaning:

The intellectual ability to penetrate deeply into ideas

Classified under:

Nouns denoting cognitive processes and contents

Synonyms:

astuteness; deepness; depth; profoundness; profundity

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

sapience; wisdom (ability to apply knowledge or experience or understanding or common sense and insight)

Derivation:

profound (showing intellectual penetration or emotional depth)

Sense 4

Meaning:

The quality of being physically deep

Classified under:

Nouns denoting attributes of people and objects

Synonyms:

deepness; profoundness; profundity

Context example:

the profundity of the mine was almost a mile

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

deepness; depth (the extent downward or backward or inward)

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

bottomlessness (the property of being very deep; without limit)

Derivation:

profound (situated at or extending to great depth; too deep to have been sounded or plumbed)

 Context examples 

I assured her that its profundity was quite unfathomable, and expressed my belief that nothing like it had ever been known.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

I looked at the bleak, inaccessible wall at my back and know the profundity of despair.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

Messner regarded her in a way that was almost paternal, what of the profundity of pity and patience with which he contrived to suffuse it.

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

I felt the silence, although I was hardly conscious of its extreme profundity, until my ear was suddenly arrested by the paddling of oars near the shore, and a person landed close to my house.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

To that intelligence there could be no objective knowledge of a body. It knew no body. The very world was not. It knew only itself and the vastness and profundity of the quiet and the dark.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)