ideality
/ˌʌɪdɪˈalɪti
/noun (plural idealities) [mass noun] formal
1The state or quality of being ideal: the ideality of the island of Aran...
- Formal possibilities, qua formal, are indefinite and the vast array of this multitude of possibilities can be considered in their pure ideality.
- At its worst, the exhibition muddied such sociological pronouncements with a problematic celebration of beauty, ideality and essential femininity.
- Dialogue was hailed the master key to unravel the mystery and considered a stairway to a higher level of ideality.
1.1The quality of expressing or being characterized by ideals: the loftiness and ideality of the Gettysburg Address...
- The narrator describes his successive days with Usher and his artmaking thus: ‘An excited and highly distempered ideality threw a sulphurous luster over all’.
- Lincoln was successful in attaining the ideality of the Gettysburg Address.
1.2 [count noun] An ideal or idealized thing: they commenced their married life with idealities about love...
- He would have ‘seen’ the very spatiality of the visible, the real which precedes all reality, all forms, all truth of particular sensations or constructed idealities.
- The democracy we speak of spreading throughout the world is now in our own country only an ideality.
- She becomes a pure ideality, a safe refuge to which Jim can return again and again, where he will never stumble up against the inevitable disappointments and absences of a real, substantial sweetheart, wife, mother, or sister.
