ferocity

[ fuh-ros-i-tee ]

noun

1. a ferocious quality or state; savage fierceness.

Other Words From

• nonfe·roci·ty noun

Word History and Origins

Origin of ferocity¹

1600–10; < Latin ferōcitās, equivalent to ferōc-, stem of ferōx ferocious + -itās -ity

Example Sentences

Since then, though, streamers say hate raids have only grown in number and ferocity.

From Washington Post

In India, the ferocity of the second wave left hospitals too full to treat the sick.

From Washington Post

Jones’s short stories, she writes, “remind us — so gently it is easy to overlook their underlying ferocity — that we are all just tiny figures inside the sweep of an often violent history.”

From Washington Post

Cloud providers can, and do, protect their customers’ data with the same ferocity as they protect their own.

From TechCrunch

Many have assumed that this is a newfound feminist ferocity, but from ancient Queen Pwa Saw, to the first woman surgeon Daw Saw Sa, who qualified in 1911, Myanmar women have always been as strong as, if not stronger than, our men.

From Time

Phone lines would catch fire from the velocity and ferocity of his words.

From The Daily Beast

He was just seamlessly being this person—the ferocity and intensity was incredible.

From The Daily Beast

But when protests in Syria turned to civil war in June 2011, that activism took on a new ferocity.

From The Daily Beast

They are clashing with Israeli police with a ferocity not seen since the second Intifada.

From The Daily Beast

The German Panzers fought with suicidal ferocity, storming the hill until it was rimmed with a bulwark of bodies.

From The Daily Beast

Some peculiar lines between these contracted brows gave a character of ferocity to this forbidding and sensual face.

From Project Gutenberg

By this illustration the native ferocity of the eighteenth-century caricaturists is glaringly exemplified.

From Project Gutenberg

The eyes had something of the ferocity but also the fidelity of a well-trained watch-dog.

From Project Gutenberg

His intensely black eyes, blacker even than the eyes of Coronado, had a stare of absolutely indescribable ferocity.

From Project Gutenberg

There was hardly a face among that gang of wild riders which did not outdo the face of Texas Smith in degraded ferocity.

From Project Gutenberg