Definitions

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

  • noun The frailty of old age; senility.
  • noun The quality or state of being perishable; impermanence.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A tendency to fall or decay; hence, the period of declining life; senility; feebleness; weakness.
  • noun In Louisiana law, lapse; failure to take effect: as, the caducity of a will from the birth of a legitimate child to the testator after its date; the caducity of a legacy from the death of the legatee before that of the testator.

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

  • noun rare Tendency to fall; the feebleness of old age; senility.

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

  • noun dotage or senility
  • noun The state of being impermanent or transitory.

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[French caducité, from caduc, frail, falling, from Latin cadūcus; see caducous.]

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Examples

  • He answered the caducity of him having a successful foreign trip the way he should have.

    Obama at Convention for Journalists - The Caucus Blog - NYTimes.com 2008

  • The attitude that words may be discarded -- indeed, that words have caducity at all -- is not salubriously abstergent, but reflects an agrestic nisus that all cultivated English speakers must eschew.

    A malison on the poor of spirit. Angry Professor 2008

  • The attitude that words may be discarded -- indeed, that words have caducity at all -- is not salubriously abstergent, but reflects an agrestic nisus that all cultivated English speakers must eschew.

    Archive 2008-10-01 Angry Professor 2008

  • Were I to conjecture, I should say that the whole will centre, before it is long, in Mr. Pitt and Co., the present being an heterogeneous jumble of youth and caducity, which cannot be efficient.

    Letters to his son on The Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman 2005

  • When you happen to see either Monsieur or Madame Perny, I beg you will give them this melancholic proof of my caducity, and tell them that the last time I went to see the boys, I carried the Michaelmas quarterage in my pocket; and when I was there I totally forgot it; but assure them, that

    Letters to his son on The Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman 2005

  • In literature, this eventual caducity is even more notorious.

    languagehat.com: NO USE WHATEVER. 2005

  • As for the labour and sorrow which his Majesty K (ing) D (avid) speaks of, I know of no age that is quite exempt from them, and have no fear of their being more severe in my caducity than they were in the flower of my age, when I had not more things to please me than I have now, although they might vary in their kind.

    George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life Helen [Editor] Clergue

  • But they wrought their awful romances of crime in lands where the sun of supreme civilization, through a gorgeous evening of Sybaritic luxury, was sinking, with red tints of revolution, into the night of anarchy and national caducity.

    The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) Various

  • The emphatic affirmation of a supermundane, spiritual order of reality and the equally emphatic assertion of the caducity of things material fitted in with the essentially Christian contention that spiritual interests are supreme.

    The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 12: Philip II-Reuss 1840-1916 1913

  • As for the labour and sorrow which his Majesty K (ing) D (avid) speaks of, I know of no age that is quite exempt from them, and have no fear of their being more severe in my caducity than they were in the flower of my age, when I had not more things to please me than I have now, although they might vary in their kind.

    George Selwyn His Letters and His Life Ed 1899

Comments

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  • impermanence

    December 12, 2008

  • The infirmity or weakness of old age; senility

    December 24, 2008

  • The older I get the more I think I have a one way ticket on the train to CaduCity!

    January 29, 2009

  • "The most observant of them called the period of caducity "the fall," and he'd usually announce its arrival out loud."

    The No Variations by Luis Chitarroni, translated by Darren Koolman, p 90

    September 16, 2013

  • Old age in its larcenous creep
    Purloins enough to make us weep.
    Let's hope we can lucidly
    Persist in caducity
    Until we stretch in dreamless sleep.

    October 8, 2015