MEANING
1. A habit, quality, or feature that is unusual and characteristic of a particular person or thing.
2. An unusual sensitivity in a particular individual to a substance such as a food or drug.
Use it for
giving a character a recognizable personal habit; describing a system’s distinctive quirks; distinguishing individual variation from a universal traitNames a distinguishing quirk of a person or thing without automatically presenting it as a fault or disorder. Writing functions: Characterization.
Words that belong together
- a personal idiosyncrasy
- idiosyncrasies of speech
- accommodate an idiosyncrasy
On the page
One of his idiosyncrasies was to turn every photograph face down before a journey.
The editor preserved the idiosyncrasies of her punctuation instead of smoothing them away.
The medical history used idiosyncrasy for an unusual response to the prescribed substance.
In that paragraph, the word refers to individual sensitivity, not to the patient’s habits.
Word forms
- Base
- idiosyncrasy
Usage notes
Count noun: idiosyncrasy; plural idiosyncrasies. Hypersensitivity use is technical; do not infer it from eccentric behaviour. Register: formal. Commonness: moderately common (qualitative editorial estimate, informed by dictionaries/corpus).
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