Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The tendency or capacity to remain afloat in a liquid or rise in air or gas.
  • noun The upward force that a fluid exerts on an object less dense than itself.
  • noun Ability to recover quickly from setbacks; resilience.
  • noun Lightness of spirit; cheerfulness.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The quality of being buoyant, that is, of floating in or on the surface of water or other fluids; relative lightness.
  • noun The power of supporting a body so that it floats: said of a fluid; specifically, the upward pressure exerted upon a body by the fluid in which it is immersed.
  • noun Figuratively, light-heartedness; cheerfulness; hopefulness; elasticity of spirit.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The property of floating on the surface of a liquid, or in a fluid, as in the atmosphere; specific lightness, which is inversely as the weight compared with that of an equal volume of water.
  • noun (Physics) The upward pressure exerted upon a floating body by a fluid, which is equal to the weight of the body; hence, also, the weight of a floating body, as measured by the volume of fluid displaced.
  • noun Cheerfulness; vivacity; liveliness; sprightliness; -- the opposite of heaviness.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun physics The upward force on a body immersed or partly immersed in a fluid.
  • noun The ability of an object to stay afloat in a fluid.
  • noun by extension Resilience or cheerfulness.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the tendency to float in water or other liquid
  • noun cheerfulness that bubbles to the surface
  • noun irrepressible liveliness and good spirit
  • noun the property of something weightless and insubstantial

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From buoyant +‎ -cy.

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