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The quality of being specific rather than general
Answer for the clue "The quality of being specific rather than general ", 11 letters:
specificity
Alternative clues for the word specificity
Word definitions for specificity in dictionaries
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Word definitions in Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1829, from French spécificité or else a native formation from specific + -ity .
Wikipedia
Word definitions in Wikipedia
In linguistics , specificity is a semantic feature of noun phrases , distinguishing between entities/nouns/referents that are unique in a given context and those which are not, even if the unique referent is not identifiable. This is distinct from the feature ...
Wiktionary
Word definitions in Wiktionary
n. 1 The state of being specific rather than general. 2 (context statistics English) The probability, in a binary test, of a true negative being correctly identified. 3 (context medicine English) The extent to which a particular diagnostic test is specific ...
WordNet
Word definitions in WordNet
n. the quality of being specific rather than general; "add a desirable note of specificity to the discussion"; "the specificity of the symptoms of the disease" the quality of being specific to a particular organism; "host specificity of a parasite"
Usage examples of specificity.
They were neither as specific nor as shattering as the grim clairvoyant images of death that had poured off the elementary-school building, but in spite of their lack of specificity and explosive effect, they had a disturbing power all their own.
Thus although each receptor type responds to glutamate, some will respond to chemically similar molecules as well, others show different forms of specificity.
Specimens taken revealed the specificity of their action, much like that of the viroids already known.
HRT increases breast density, which reduces the sensitivity and specificity of breast screening.
To unravel the dialectic between specificity and plasticity and to understand its mechanisms form some of the major tasks of modern biology.
So it turns out that to understand the mechanisms of memory, of plasticity, it is also necessary to understand the mechanisms of specificity.
Much that was known didn't fit with the werebear tale: the specificity and tidiness of the flesh removal, caching the flesh, stealing film, moving and hiding the body.
Because of the specificity of his fear, he did not sound like a typical aerophobic passenger, and all of the flight attendants were staring at him with, if not respect, at least a wary thoughtfulness.
In their staging and form, both plays broke away from the box sets and specificity of character and historical time and place so typical of the traditional drama.
Chomsky's view is that language and indeed grammar are programmed into the brain's 'deep structure' - that is, they are an aspect of what I would describe as the brain's specificity.
Whereas once biologists used to speak of organisms as the product of the interplay of nature and nurture, or, in modern language, genes and environment, today this dichotomy is recognized as simplistic, for it is an individual's genes, expressed during development, which provide the basis for both specificity and plasticity.
Specificity is the property that confers on brains the ability to make sense of their environment, to recognize invariance and to respond in an orderly way to regularities in the external world.
By contrast the key feature of a fully developed nervous system is its specificity, the precise set of connections by which a signal beginning at a particular sensory cell runs in a defined route, ending in some effector cell, a private line, essentially insulated from the multitude of other neurons within the system.