Also 7 authentity. [f. AUTHENTIC a. + -ITY. Cf. mod.F. authenticité.] The quality of being authentic, or entitled to acceptance.
1. as being authoritative or duly authorized.
1657. Trapp, Comm. Job i. 1. Sufficiently asserting the authentity and authority of this Book.
1858. Hawthorne, Fr. & It. Jrnls., II. 254. He proved the authenticity of his mission.
2. as being in accordance with fact, as being true in substance.
1762. H. Walpole, Vertue’s Anecd. Paint. (1786), I. 53. The portrait … was rather a work of command and imagination than of authenticity.
1790. Boswell, Johnson, V. ix. 295. What I have preserved … has the value of the most perfect authenticity.
1830. J. Poynder, in Academy, 21 Oct. (1876), 410/1. The value of the evidence must, of course, depend entirely on its authenticity.
1868. Freeman, Norm. Conq. (1876), II. App. 663. The fact at once stamps its authenticity.
3. as being what it professes in origin or authorship, as being genuine; genuineness.
1760. Hume, in Four C. Eng. Lett., 243. With regard to the authenticity of these fragments of our Highland poetry.
1790. Paley, Hor. Paul., I. 3. As to the authenticity of the epistles, this argument … is nearly conclusive.
1855. Milman, Lat. Chr. (1864), II. IV. i. 175, note. Though not free from interpolation yet there seems no reason to doubt its authenticity.
4. as being real, actual; reality.
1851. Mariotti, Italy, in 1848, 116. A voucher for the authenticity of deeds of wanton cruelty.
¶ By some writers, especially on the Christian evidences, authenticity has been confined to sense 2, and genuineness used in sense 3.
