The Collaborative International Dictionary
Sui generis \Su"i gen"e*ris\ [L.] Of his or its own kind.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1787, Latin, literally "of one's own kind, peculiar." First element from sui, genitive of suus "his, her, its, one's," from Old Latin sovos, from PIE root *swe-, pronoun of the third person (see idiom).
Wiktionary
a. 1 In a class of its own; one of a kind. 2 (context rarer English) By itself; of its own.
WordNet
adj. constituting a class of its own; unique; "a history book sui generis"; "sui generis works like Mary Chestnut's Civil War diary"
Wikipedia
Sui Generis is one of the most important rock bands in Argentinian history, enjoying enormous success and popularity during the first half of the 1970s and a following that lasts to the present throughout South America. Sui Generis disbanded on September 5, 1975 and, despite concerts that took place in 1980 and 2001, a permanent re-formation has been ruled out.
Sui Generis is an Argentinian folk rock band.
Sui Generis may also refer to:
- Sui generis, a status that defies categorization
- Sui Generis (album), a pop album by Yuri
Sui Generis is the tenth album by Mexican pop singer Yuri. It was released on September 24, 1989. It sold more than 350,000 copies earning Gold and Platinum discs 1.
Usage examples of "sui generis".
Mystical experiences (of a psychic, subtle, causal, or nondual nature) are so common to humankind, and share at least a broad similarity wherever they occur (despite the inevitable cultural colorings given to them)and when they do occur, virtually all of them carry the overwhelming conviction that one is not stumbling onto something sui generis, made up, constructed at the moment, or fabricated by the individual human mind.
What is 'so-of-itself,' sui generis in Latin, means coming into being spontaneously on its own accord, and that, incidentally, is the real meaning of virgin birth.
Furthermore, as he contemplates writing it he realizes that his novel will be the perfect novel, the one embodying novelness, comprising all that is novel and nothing that is not-novel, a novel that so transcends the particular that it is both generic and sui generis.
My entire European mythology capsized under the crash of waves Britannia never ruled and then I knew that the denizens of these deeps are sui generis and belong to no mythology but their weird own.
Hitherto the computer was only quantitatively different - the multimedia and the Internet have made it qualitatively superior, actually, sui generis, unique.
Descartes may have meant his metaphor to be precise, as structurally accurate a descriptor of the brain and its processes as Harvey's of the heart as a pump, but I suggest we can take it as no more and no less than poetic, a way of thinking about a complex human phenomenon which places it not sui generis but as merely one amongst other types of matter in motion.
And besides, bloody mosaic though it was, the countenance before me was undoubtedly a human face, and not an unclassifiable, sui generis visage similar to my own.