Where it sits
Everything a thing could lose and still be itself is on the left. What's left is on the right.
Tell it apart
| Aspect | Quiddity | Haecceity |
|---|---|---|
| Answers | What is it? | Which one is it? |
| Shared with others | Yes | No |
| Latin root | quid, 'what' | haec, 'this' |
| Survives a copy | Yes | No |
Quiddity is what KIND of thing it is — the essence it shares with everything else of its type. Haecceity is that it is THIS one and no other — the thisness that no duplicate could copy. Two medieval terms for two genuinely different questions.
What it doesn't mean
That's a late, drifted sense. The core meaning is metaphysical essence, and the 'quibble' sense from the 1530s was originally an insult aimed at scholastic philosophers rather than a description of charming oddity.
It's a working term in Aristotelian and Thomist philosophy, translating essentia. Nabokov used it straight in Pale Fire in 1962 — it has never stopped being usable in its original sense.
What it really means
Quiddity is Latin for whatness, and that is not a translator's paraphrase — it's the literal construction. Quid means what; -itās is the suffix that turns adjectives into abstract nouns, our -ness. The scholastics built the word to answer Aristotle's question what is it? in a form you could put in a sentence.
English liked it enough to build it twice. Whatness is a real English word, a direct calque, coined for exactly the same purpose.
What makes the entry interesting is the second meaning. By the 1530s, quiddity had also come to mean a quibble — a trifling nicety in argument. That wasn't a drift; it was an attack. Scholastic philosophers had spent centuries arguing about essence in increasingly fine distinctions, and the wider culture responded by taking their central technical term and making it a synonym for pedantry.
So one word carries both the serious question and the contempt for people who asked it too often.
And it's worth keeping separate from its medieval companion. Haecceity — from haec, this — is thisness: not what kind of thing something is, but that it is this particular one and no other. Quiddity survives a perfect copy; haecceity doesn't. Two words, two genuinely different questions, and English kept the first and mostly forgot the second.
Where it comes from
Latin — what
Latin — -ness, state of
Literally 'what-ness'. English already has the exact calque — 'whatness' — coined to translate the same idea.
- late 14th century
Enters English in the scholastic sense: the real essence that distinguishes a thing from all others.
- 1530s
A second sense appears — a trifling nicety in argument, a quibble — born of contempt for scholastic hair-splitting.
In real life
- What she wanted the photograph to catch was the quiddity of the place: not just a harbour, but this harbour.
- A good cook respects the quiddity of a tomato and doesn't drown it in sauce.
- The older sense: the committee lost an hour to legal quiddities about whether shall meant must.
Questions
Q01What does quiddity actually mean?
The essence of a thing — the property set that makes it what it is rather than something else. It's a scholastic term translating Aristotle, and English has a direct calque of it: 'whatness'.
Q02Why does it also mean a quibble?
By the 1530s, scholastic disputes over essence were being mocked as pedantic hair-splitting, and the word absorbed the mockery. So one word carries both the profound question and the contempt for people who asked it too often.
Q03Is there an English equivalent?
Yes — 'whatness', a direct calque of the Latin quidditas, from quid, 'what'. It's a rare case where English built the exact same word twice, once borrowed and once native.