obscenity - Wiktionary, the free dictionary (original) (raw)

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

From obscene +‎ -ity, from Latin obscenitas.

obscenity (countable and uncountable, plural obscenities)

  1. (countable) Something that is obscene.
    Martha wouldn't go into the art museum because, as she put it, "They have obscenities just sitting out, on display!"
  2. (countable) An act of obscene behaviour.
    Bestiality was outlawed as an obscenity in the strongly conservative community.
  3. (countable) Specifically, an offensive word; a profanity; a dirty word.
    Eliza couldn't stand her daughter's music; as she saw it, it was just shouted obscenities and a heavy drum beat.
    • 2001, Dean R. Koontz, One Door Away from Heaven, Random House, →ISBN, page 497:
      Her mother favored a multiyear project: obscenities carved in intricate and clever juxtapositions, descending every finger, curling in lettered whorls across the palm, fanning in offensive rays across the opisthenar, which is the name for the back of the hand, a word that Leilani knew because she had studied the structure of the human hand in detail, the better to understand her difference.
    • 2023 January 10, Adam Rogers, “Move over, megatons”, in Business Insider‎[1], archived from the original on 19 April 2023:
      Next up was the horse-trading. Or, as Brown describes it, consulting with stakeholders. That's how he found out that queca, with one C, is an obscenity in Portuguese.
  4. (uncountable) Lewdness, indecency, or offensive behaviour or material.
    The coalition of religious conservatives was campaigning against, in their view, rampant obscenity in the entertainment industry.
    • 2008 October 29, Margalit Fox, “Damiano, 80, directed 'Deep Throat'”, in The New York Times‎[2], archived from the original on 18 December 2022:
      Over three and a half decades, "Deep Throat" has been damned by religious groups, decried by feminists, defended by First Amendment advocates, derided by critics and debated by social scientists. It dragged for years through local and federal courts around the country in a welter of obscenity trials in which it was variously banned, unbanned and rebanned.
  5. (uncountable) The fact of being obscene.
    • 1983 February 5, Shawn Towey, “Philly Women Convict Right”, in Gay Community News, volume 10, number 28, page 1:
      Henia Flint Goodman, a Holocaust survivor,spoke in outrage against the obscenity of anti-abortion literature which compares a woman's free choice to have an abortion with the crimes of the Nazi state.

something that is obscene