omnitude

omnitude

English

Etymology

From New Latin omnitūdō (attested in the 18th century).

Noun

omnitude (plural omnitudes)

1. The fact or condition of being all. [from mid-19th c.]
   • 1848, Philip James Bailey, Festus, London: William Pickering, 3rd edition, p. 329,

     Said I not my soul

     Had taken up its freedom […] ?

     And, holding in itself the omnitude

     Of being, God-endowed, it doth become

     World-representative?

   • 1860, William Hamilton, Lectures in Logic, edited by Henry L. Mansel and John Veitch, Boston: Gould & Lincoln, Volume 2, Lecture 8, p. 173,

     Universal Judgments are those in which the whole number of objects within a sphere or class are judged of,—as All men are mortal, or Every man is mortal, the all in the one case defining the whole collectively,—the every in the other defining it discretively. In such judgments the notion of a determinative wholeness or totality, in the form of omnitude or allness, is involved.

   • 1988, Stuart Schneiderman, An Angel Passes: How the Sexes Became Undivided, New York University Press, Introduction, p. 11,

     For an author like John Scotus Erigena, who wrote in the ninth century, it happens that anything we may say of God the Father is a distortion, a limitation on his omnitude.

   • 2009, Gary Lutz, “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” The Believer, 59, 1 January 2009,

     […] as someone now yearning to become a writer, I knew exactly what I wanted to try to write: […] the sort of sentence that, even when liberated from its receiving context, impresses itself upon the eye and the ear as a totality, an omnitude, unto itself.

Synonyms

• allness
• omneity
• totality