(n.) The essence, nature, or distinctive peculiarity, of a thing; that which answers the question, Quid est? or, What is it?
(n.) A trifling nicety; a cavil; a quibble.
Example Sentences:
(1) And they felt that baking said much about Britain and its regional quiddities, from Dundee cakes to bara brith to Bakewell tarts.
(2) Poster banadvertsonitv said: "ITV show once again what a bunch of amateurs they really are," while quidditys_shore complained: "The one thing you don't want to mess up and ITV do it big time."
(3) The argument usually made against buying humans is one of dignity, but I think what you'd lose is not dignity but quiddity: you have no essential self if you can be bartered in a market of your own creation, measured up alongside a speedboat (and, guttingly, worth a lot less).
(4) Nonetheless, in the quiddity of the Jedi you can see a director who was alive to the change in the political culture and its profound but rarely discussed shifts.
Quintessence
Definition:
(n.) The fifth or last and highest essence or power in a natural body. See Ferment oils, under Ferment.
(n.) Hence: An extract from anything, containing its rarest virtue, or most subtle and essential constituent in a small quantity; pure or concentrated essence.
(v. t.) To distil or extract as a quintessence; to reduce to a quintessence.
Example Sentences:
(1) This was the quintessence of political violence in Mexico for decades, between the state and the leftist opposition.
(2) The idea that you can devolve it all is nuts.” Then there are the pubs, those quintessences of British culture that also have the ability to give space and identity to a city’s multiple communities.
(3) Unlike Nabokov, Kafka could certainly discern music and respond to it, but just as he found it hard to assent to "the quintessence of life", so he found it impossible to believe wholeheartedly in its expression.
(4) In his journals, he wrote that his aim was to render "the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh".
(5) On his return to California, he continued to use his camera as a means to express "the very substance and the quintessence of the thing itself", photographing in close-up what he saw around him: an egg-slicer, a toadstool, a cup, a gnarled tree.
(6) It is subtitled Something Out of Nothing, a title that says much about how his ever-restless imagination had found yet another way of seeing, and one that perhaps surprised even himself in its rendering of "the very substance and quintessence" of that extraordinary landscape.
(7) One: rural reform in a country where land, land rights and ownership of land are the quintessence of politics and power.
(8) Humiliated rage and furtive envy characterise Muslim insurrectionaries and Hindu fanatics today as much as they did the militarist Japanese insisting on their unique spiritual quintessence.
(9) Sacks goes on to quote Schopenhauer approvingly: "Music expresses only the quintessence of life and of its events, never these themselves."