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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
oddity
noun
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ A white buffalo is an animal oddity.
▪ The oddity of the situation didn't seem to bother her at all.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ But, as with Herczeg s letter to the Reader, it is the last sentence that is the real oddity.
▪ Cairns and co focus on the oddities of human nature with a certain morbid curiosity.
▪ Horton was considered an oddity by most eastern cognoscenti, and his school and company at best a noble experiment.
▪ The most successful of the human oddities, Taylor says, were those who could present their deformities as performance art.
▪ Their very oddity deterred him from doing so.
▪ There are other examples of cultural evolution in birds and monkeys, but these are just interesting oddities.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
oddity

oddity \odd"i*ty\ ([o^]d"[i^]*t[y^]), n.; pl. Oddities ([o^]d"[i^]*t[i^]z).

  1. The quality or state of being odd; singularity; queerness; peculiarity; as, oddity of dress, manners, and the like.

    That infinitude of oddities in him.
    --Sterne.

  2. That which is odd; as, a collection of oddities.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
oddity

1713, "odd characteristic or trait," a hybrid from odd + -ity. Meaning "odd person" is first recorded 1748.

Wiktionary
oddity

n. An odd or strange thing or opinion.

WordNet
oddity
  1. n. eccentricity that is not easily explained [syn: oddness]

  2. a strange attitude or habit [syn: queerness, quirk, quirkiness, crotchet]

  3. something unusual -- perhaps worthy of collecting [syn: curio, curiosity, oddment, peculiarity, rarity]

Usage examples of "oddity".

Over sandwiches, several participants discussed the oddity of working with countries like Pakistan--an authoritarian regime with a secret police force of significant size and vast latitude.

Her oddity, her awkwardness, and her self-conceit gave me the desire to know her better, and I began to dance attendance upon her.

This emphasis brought no surprise to the bookseller, who was accustomed to the oddities of edition hunters.

One of the oddities of this profession, Mr Boulting, is that very often the first time we meet people is after they have ceased to be.

With all these oddities, the three friends were truly intelligent and even witty, and, at the beginning of my acquaintance with them, I could not reconcile these antagonistic points.

In the next, a true oddity, reading matter caught not in the facets of decagons but on supple wry-grass paper, lovingly handmade, bound with cor-tail thread, surrounded by covers fashioned from the speckled hides of razor-raptors, dyed hin-demuth, pebbled searay, even, astonishingly, perwillon.

Czech Derain, that oddity of history, would be a disruption, an intrusive presence on the wall of that place.

Pink singing scallops were an uneaten oddity, mussel cultivation was unknown, geoducks were spurned by everyone but a few fishermen, and the salmon caviar was shipped abroad.

Arin said some people got worried about what would happen if Loopers and ship owners got interested in Befores as more than a sometime high-profit oddity.

The next human oddity was more well received by the marks than any other: Miss Gloria Neames, the 750-pound woman, who was supposed to be the fattest fat lady on earth.

The latter was one of the oddities of Pickax, a city full of oddities.

But the observation of Sir Hugh, upon the oddity of her marrying the last, she was piqued with a most earnest ambition to reverse.

Dostoyevsky, the news item, whether it was a crime of passion, a vast confidence trick or financial catastrophe, a scandalous verdict, a personal or collective attempt at arson, a suicide caused by despair or ideology, a train crash, children plotting against their father, or the numerous cases of ill-treated children, had its roots deep in changeable reality and its appalling or amazing oddity revealed the subterranean upheavals of society.

What the day before it had taken him three hours to make from striped pants, a jacketlike rag with bold checks, a brimless hat, and, with the help of an incomplete and ramshackle ladder, an armful of freshly cut willow switches, he tore down the following morning, to construct from the same materials an oddity of a very different race and faith, but which like its predecessor commanded birds to keep their distance.

Chancing to meet with one of his acquaintance at a certain coffee-house, the discourse turned upon the characters of mankind, when, among other oddities, his friend brought upon the carpet a certain old gentlewoman of such a rapacious disposition, that, like a jackdaw, she never beheld any metalline substance, without an inclination, and even an effort to secrete it for her own use and contemplation.