severity

Other forms of severity

plural

severities·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about severity

What does severity mean?

severity means "used of the degree of something undesirable e.g. pain or weather". That is the primary sense; the word has 4 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in severity?

severity has 4 syllables: se-ver-i-ty. The stress falls on "ver". In IPA it is /sɪˈvɛɹɪti/.

What is another word for severity?

Close synonyms include badness, severeness, asperity, grimness, hardship. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is severity a common word?

severity is banded "Familiar" — widely understood, used when the subject calls for it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.