purity

Etymology

It is inherited from Middle English purte, later purete and puryte,^[2][3][4] borrowed from Old French purté (“freedom from moral pollution”),^[5][2] from Late Latin pūritās (“cleanness, pureness”),^[5][3][2] from Latin pūrus (“clean, pure, unmixed”), the source of pure, with the suffix -tās.^[5][3] The Old French word, recorded from the end of the 12th century, is the inherited form, while the Anglo-Norman and Middle French purité and pureté, from which the later English forms come, were remodelled after the Latin noun.^[5] The Anglo-Norman word, recorded from the early 12th century, already meant both physical pureness and moral or spiritual purity.^[6] Other Romance forms are puritat, puridad and purità.^[5]

Earliest recorded meaning

Moral or spiritual pureness, freedom from sin; innocence, chastity: about 1225, in the Ancrene Riwle,^[5][2] about 1200 in Etymonline.^[3] Barnhart also finds it as a surname in 1198.^[2]

Semantic evolution

The religious sense came first; in the Vulgate Latin pūritās already meant moral and spiritual purity.^[5] The physical sense, freedom from mixture or contamination, followed in the 15th century, first in a translation of Palladius on farming,^[5][3] and since 1553 the word also meant freedom from foreign elements or outside influence, as of language or style.^[5] French developed the same senses: the purity of language is recorded there in 1580.^[5] The spelling purity first appears in 1563.^[2] Johnson (1755) gave three senses: cleanness, freedom from guilt, and chastity.^[7] In physics the word also measures how much of a single-frequency colour a mixture contains.^[8][9]

Timeline

• 1198 – as a surname.^[2]
• c. 1225 – moral or spiritual purity, chastity, in the Ancrene Riwle.^[5][2]
• c. 1440 – physical pureness, freedom from contamination.^[5]
• before 1475 – a pure substance (obsolete by 1720).^[5]
• 1553 – freedom from foreign elements; refinement, clarity.^[5]
• 1563 – the spelling purity.^[2]

Meanings

Noun

1. The state of being free from dirt, mixture or contamination: The lab tested the purity of the gold.^[8][9][5]
2. Freedom from sin or moral fault; innocence or chastity.^[9][5]
3. Freedom from foreign elements, especially in language or style.^[9][5]
4. (physics) The proportion of a pure spectral colour in a mixture with white or achromatic light.^[8][9]

Related words

• pure
• puritan
• impurity
• purify
• purge

References

1. ^ a b Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
3. ^ a b c d e Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
4. ^ Klein, Ernest. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1966–1967.
5. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
6. ^ Anglo-Norman Dictionary (AND2), Aberystwyth University, anglo-norman.net (2nd ed., 2005–)
7. ^ Johnson, Samuel (1755), A Dictionary of the English Language, London; 4th ed. 1773; Johnson's Dictionary Online, ed. Beth Rapp Young et al.
8. ^ a b c Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins
9. ^ a b c d e Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster