Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun The state or quality of being mutable.
- noun Changeableness, as of mind, disposition, or will; inconstancy; instability: as, the mutability of opinion or purpose.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun The quality of being mutable, or subject to change or alteration, either in form, state, or essential character; susceptibility of change; changeableness; inconstancy; variation.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun The quality or state of being
mutable .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun the quality of being capable of mutation
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
Support
Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word mutability.
Examples
-
I wish I could freeze frame them, but their mutability is their poignant charm.
-
Steadfastness in mutability, that is the common need, a Rock of Ages.
-
I guess 'mutability' is the right word for it all.
-
Politic as it is to document this kind of manmade instability, however, Shapcott's poems temper their more urgent observations with the knowledge that both constancy and change are, so to speak, constructs of the human imagination, and "mutability" itself only a word.
-
To me, the most telling evidence of our "mutability" comes from those LGBT people who change even when there is little or no external duress.
Patricia Nell Warren: Civil Rights for Gays: Does "Immutable" Really Describe Us?
-
So too with a tree, which guarantees its immortality by flourishing, generating seed, and dying, so that the idea of a tree will be perpetuated by what Edmund Spenser calls 'mutability'.
-
Nostalgia for an unchanging and primary language — and as late as 1760 Samuel Johnson was complaining of the "mutability" of human speech — partly explains why the major projects of premodern philology were normative grammar and etymology intended to derive European words from their divinely given Hebrew "originals."
-
But the word 'mutability' means change - and sometimes, there at the edges of it, there is twinkling green.''
Telegraph.co.uk - Telegraph online, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph
-
To determine the generalizability of this kind of mutability 'switching' among a wider range of bacteria, we examined the distribution of tandem repeats within MMR genes in over 100 bacterial species and found that multiple genetic switches might exist in these bacteria and may spontaneously modulate bacterial mutability during evolution.
-
To determine the generalizability of this kind of mutability 'switching' among a wider range of bacteria, we examined the distribution of tandem repeats within MMR genes in over 100 bacterial species and found that multiple genetic switches might exist in these bacteria and may spontaneously modulate bacterial mutability during evolution.
travismcdermott commented on the word mutability
a1420 LYDGATE Troyyes Bk. (Augustus A.4) I. 1859 Thei seyn that chawng and mutabilite Appropred ben to femynyte.
July 15, 2008