[f. FLUID a. + -ITY. Cf. F. fluidité.]
1. The quality or condition of being fluid.
1605. Timme, Quersit., I. iv. D b. For Sulphur, or that oyly moysture, is (as I haue said) a meane, which with his humidity, softnesse, and fluidity or passablenes.
1667. Phil. Trans., II. 491. A too great fluidity of the bloud, as well as its Coagulation, may cause death.
1744. Berkeley, Siris, § 60. Being good against too great fluidity as a balsamic.
1827. Faraday, Chem. Manip., xv. 359. The cement should be heated to fluidity on the sand-bath, but not to a greater degree.
1858. Greener, Gunnery, 261. When he made his statements of the immense resistance which the fluidity of the air offered to projectiles in a high state of velocity, they were treated as the idle chimeras of a speculative brain.
1869. Phillips, Vesuv., iv. 107. Gave forth from ten mouths on this line a stream of lava of remarkable fluidity.
b. fig. and of non-physical things.
1824. Galt, Rothelan, II. IV. iii. 116. If Ralph Hanslap had any fluidity of mind, which could at all be said to resemble the movements of passion, it was curiosity.
1873. A. M. Fairbairn, Race and Religion, in Contemporary Review, XXII. Oct., 794. The remarkable diffusion and fluidity of these distinctively Semitic names of God seem to warrant a double inference.
1886. Mrs. Lynn Linton, Paston Carew, I. iii. 47. He distrusted the people as much as the aristocracy, and ridiculed the fossilization of Toryism equally with the fluidity of Radicalism.
1892. Speaker, VI. 3 Sept., 294/2. He is rather content to dwell upon the fluidity and informality of the Church’s prime.
2. Of speech, literary composition, etc.: The quality of flowing easily and clearly.
1603. Florio, Montaigne, I. xxxvi. 115. First a blithe and ingenious fluiditie [F. fluidité], then a quaint-wittie and loftie conceit.
1822. New Monthly Mag., VI. 441/2. Here was Miss Forde singing with a sweetness and a fluidity to which justice was scarcely done in London.
1880. Swinburne, A Study of Shakespeare, ii. (ed. 2), 91. There is the same comparative tenuity and fluidity of verse.
1883. The Nation (N.Y.), 29 Nov., XXXVII. 446/3. The letters of the mother [Mme. de Rémusat] at this time are decidedly better than those of the son: they have much grace, much fluidity of thought, and of expression.
