Quiddity is the essential whatness of a thing — what makes it that thing and not another. It also carries an older, drier sense: a trifling point or quibble, left over from scholastic hair-splitting.
Not coined in English — Medieval Latin quidditās, a scholastic coinage translating Aristotle.
// Where it sits
Everything a thing could lose and still be itself is on the left. What's left is on the right.
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
Literally 'what-ness'. English already has the exact calque — 'whatness' — coined to translate the same idea.
Myths & misconceptions
Quiddity just means 'quirk' or 'eccentricity'.
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 purely literary flourish.
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.
Compare & contrast
Quiddity vs haecceity
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.
| // | 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 |
How it connects
- Essentialismquiddity is the thing essentialism claims objects have.
- Acatalepsyboth are scholastic-era terms that survived into modern English.
Tell it apart
Questions people ask
- What 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'.
- Why 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.
- Is 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.