tremendosity meaning (rare): definition, etymology and quotations

tremendosity

noun

Etymology From tremend(ous) + -osity.

Rare The state or condition of being tremendous.

He talks of enlarging the stage after Easter, probably to make room for Mrs. Honey’s foot, which is remarkable for its tremendosity.1837 March 18, “Theatricals”, in Figaro in London, volume VI, number 276, London: […] ([F]or the Proprietor) by W. Strange, […], page 44, column 1:
The lady librarian waxing wroth at our complimentary notice of her smithy, blew the bellows with such tremendosity, in the effervescence of her indignation, as to scatter over the neighbouring roofs, the 24 first pages of the ‘Mysteries of London,’ and Jack and the Bean-stalk.’1848 August 5, Bell’s Life in Sydney and Sporting Reviewer, volume IV, number 158, Sydney, N.S.W., page [3], column 1:

4 more examples

We arrived punctually, and as we walked down the thoroughfare, so majestically lined with eating-houses, public-houses, and a boot shop, that leads to the sea front, I was amazed at the tremendosity (I can find no other word, it is of my own manufacture, and I dedicate it to the public for ever) of the crowds that turned out to welcome us.1898 July 8, Hooami, “Notes in General”, in The Stanmore Observer, Affiliated with The Wealdstone, Harrow and Wembley Observer, number 169, page [7]:
He looked at her for a moment. “You are prodigious,” he said, richly. “I see that you understand me,” and she paused for a moment of introspection. “It is what, in the long run, I feel to be my actuating ideal—I mean, of course, our sympathy.” The tremendosity of the implication, at all events, arrested his attention. “I,” her interlocutor was thoughtfully considering, “agree, and—there you are.” “It is what,” she paused for a moment, with a pleasant pointedness of manner, “after all, means most to me. He is of sympathy, a tremendosity, a richness, a vagueness, that quite satisfies me.”1903, James Henry, “The Idealists”, in The Mortarboard, […] [T]he Junior Class of Barnard College, books II–III, pages 86–87:
“But that is just what does not happen in the case of Mr. James’s people. They are merged in the background so that you never can get behind them, and fairly feel and see them all round. Europe doesn’t detach them; nothing does. ‘There they are,’ as he keeps making his people say in all his late books, when they are not calling one another dear lady, and dear man, and prodigious and magnificent, and of a vagueness or a richness, or a sympathy, or an opacity. No, he is of a tremendosity, but he worries me to death; he kills me; he really gives me a headache. He fascinates me, but I have no patience with him.”1903 January, William Dean Howells, “Mr. Henry James’s Later Work”, in George [Brinton McClellan] Harvey, editor, The North American Review, volume CLXXVI, number 1 / DLIV, New York, N.Y.: The North American Review Publishing Co., section III, pages 128–129:
Because in the eye of a Property Society these are not human beings, but are merely pawns, like Gretchen, who exist only for the purpose of allowing a real human being like Faust to work out what is pompously called the tremendous “problems of life” that present themselves to the bourgeois mind. This overpowering sense of the “tremendosity” of human “problems” is one of the manifestations of that hypocrisy which has ever characterized the domineering class. These problems are nothing more nor less than how to keep down the subject class and make it believe itself incompetent to assume control and make itself happy. Overwhelmed by the “tremendosity” of this problem, the bourgeois mind seeks to solve it by formulas more difficult than the problem itself.1908, Marcus Hitch, “Comments”, in Goethe’s Faust: A Fragment of Socialist Criticism, Chicago, Ill.: Charles H[ope] Kerr & Company, page 74:

Rare Someone or something that is tremendous.

The functions were chiefly remarkable, not for sport, but for diluted tea and cake and a tremendosity of luscious local girl.1909 October 16, “Pithy Pars”, in The Critic, volume V, number 220, page 3, column 1:
The speaker of the evening was the Rev. John Cavanaugh, C. S. C., former president of the Unievrsity.^([sic]) He delivered a splendid address which was entitled “Tremendosities.”1924, “Knights of Columbus Initiate”, in The Notre Dame Scholastic, Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame, page 390, column 2:

2 more examples

All of you, in varying degrees, are being driven from pillar to post in this world of intertwining tremendosities. Little stands secure, except for the Exclusivists, i.e., for those who can choose through the harmony of their personalities pickings from the world according to their tastes.1925, Adrian Stokes, The Thread of Ariadne, E. P. Dutton & Company, page 4:
But the star of the weekend was OMS itself. Without going into its tremendosities, let’s just agree that it’s without doubt the world’s finest racing plant.1970, Road & Track, volume 22, page 78:

Synonyms: tremendousness