irrelevancy

English

Etymology

ir- +‎ relevancy or irrelevant +‎ -cy

Noun

irrelevancy (countable and uncountable, plural irrelevancies)

1. (uncountable) The quality of being irrelevant or inapplicable; lack of pertinence or connection.
2. (countable) A thing that is irrelevant—having no bearing on the subject of discussion.
   • 1895, Mark Twain, Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences:

     To believe that such talk really ever came out of people's mouths would be to believe that there was a time when time was of no value to a person who thought he had something to say; when it was the custom to spread a two-minute remark out to ten; when a man's mouth was a rolling-mill, and busied itself all day long in turning four-foot pigs of thought into thirty-foot bars of conversational railroad iron by attenuation; when subjects were seldom faithfully stuck to, but the talk wandered all around and arrived nowhere; when conversations consisted mainly of irrelevancies, with here and there a relevancy, a relevancy with an embarrassed look, as not being able to explain how it got there.

Synonyms

• irrelevance

Antonyms

• relevancy

Translations

the quality of being irrelevant or inapplicable

• German: ^{(please verify)} Belanglosigkeit (de) f
• Irish: neamhábharthacht f
• Polish: błahość (pl) f

a thing that is irrelevant

• German: Belanglosigkeit (de) f

The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.

Translations to be checked

References

• “irrelevancy”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC.