verity

From Middle English verite, from Anglo-Norman verité or Middle French verité, from Old French verité, from Latin vēritās, from the adjective vērus (“true”).

• IPA^(key): /ˈvɛɹɪti/

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verity (countable and uncountable, plural verities)

1. (uncommon) Truth, fact or reality, especially an enduring religious or ethical truth; veracity.
   • c. 1599–1602 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act V, scene ii]:

     [...] but in the verity of extolment
     I take him to be a soul of great article and his infusion
     of such dearth and rareness as, to make true diction of
     him, his semblable in his mirror, and who else would
     trace him, his umbrage, nothing more.

   • 1650, Thomas Browne, chapter I, in Pseudodoxia Epidemica: […], 2nd edition, London: […] A[braham] Miller, for Edw[ard] Dod and Nath[aniel] Ekins, […], →OCLC, 1st book, page 3:

     For the assured truth of things is derived from the principles of knowledg, and causes which determine their verities.

   • 1972, Don DeLillo, End Zone, page 54:

     I was moving into the biblical phase of the afternoon, the peak of my new simplicity. A verity less than eternal had little appeal.

   • 1981, William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, London: Rider/Hutchinson & Co., page 180:

     If civilized life had covered over the ancient verities, Dumuzi learns in his tragic death that the sheepfold is still there to reclaim him.

   • 2018, James Lambert, “Setting the Record Straight: An In-depth Examination of Hobson-Jobson”, in International Journal of Lexicography, volume 31, number 4, →DOI, page 487:

     As we shall see, all of these statements are of limited verity.

2. A true statement; an established doctrine.
   • 2002, Colin Jones, The Great Nation, Penguin, published 2003, pages 290–1:

     Absolutist verities were not only being challenged in more systematic and more daring forms than hitherto; the parameters of political debate were also being widened by both government and its critics.

   • 2025 September 13, Simon Kuper, “How Maga rewrote the Little Red Book”, in FT Weekend, Life & Arts, page 18:

     Now populists recycle communist verities: the fetishisation of working-class culture, the vision of a good “people” fighting a bad elite, the belief that the state should control business and the dismissal of parliamentary democracy as a bourgeois sham.