insipidity

Borrowed from Medieval Latin īnsipiditās. By surface analysis, insipid +‎ -ity.

insipidity (countable and uncountable, plural insipidities)

1. (uncountable) The condition of being insipid; insipidness.
   • 1735, Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, Book I, Notes Variorum, in The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope, Volume 2, London: Lawton Gilliver, p. 98,

     Nahum Tate was Poet Laureate, a cold writer, of no invention, but sometimes translated tolerably when befriended by Mr. Dryden. In his second part of Absalom and Achitophel are above two hundred admirable lines together of that great hand, which strongly shine through the insipidity of the rest.

   • 1811, Jane Austen, chapter 34, in Sense and Sensibility‎:

     Her complexion was sallow; and her features small, without beauty, and naturally without expression; but a lucky contraction of the brow had rescued her countenance from the disgrace of insipidity, by giving it the strong characters of pride and ill nature.

2. (countable) Something that is insipid; an insipid utterance, sight, object, etc.
   • 1857, John Addington Symonds, chapter 1, in The Principles of Beauty‎, London: Bell & Daldy, page 39:

     The lovers of beauty, preferring what is dull to what is offensive, will rather doze over the inanities and insipidities of a drowsy dilettantism, than choose to be irritated into wakeful attention by ugly contours, disproportioned figures, and ill-assorted colours, drawn and arranged after the hard and ignorant manner of the early Christian painters, and imbued with the childish symbolism of the dismal Middle Ages.

   • 1913, Isaac Goldberg, chapter 4, in Sir Wm. S. Gilbert: A Study in Modern Satire‎, Boston: Stratford, page 84:

     […] Gilbert literally educated the English public away from the popular insipidities to which they had grown accustomed, up to a standard of taste to which all future writers of operetta must aspire.

• insipidness
• wearishness