acuity

UK/əˈkjuːɪti/US/əˈkjuːɪti/

nounC1Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #12,087 of 15,258leans written

Acuity is sharpness of sight, hearing or thought. Visual acuity, mental acuity, lose some acuity.

Visual acuity is what the letter chart measures, and normal is called six-six in Britain and twenty-twenty in America for the same thing. Of the mind it means quickness rather than knowledge.

Definitions of acuity

1nounacuitySharpness of sight, hearing or thought.C1
“Owls hunt at night thanks to the remarkable acuity of their hearing.”

acuity is a sharpness.

Where it comes from

Latin acuitas comes from acuere, to sharpen, from acus, a needle.

Proto-Indo-European
*h₂eḱ-
Latin
acuō — sharpen
Medieval Latin
acuitas
Middle French
acuité
Middle English
acuite
English, today
acuity

From Middle English acuite, acuyte, from Middle French acuité, from Medieval Latin acuitas, irreg., from Latin acuō (“sharpen”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

acuity in the wild

Visual acuity (VA) commonly refers to the clarity of vision, but technically rates an animal's ability to recognize small details with precision.
Visual acuity
Visual acuity depends on optical and neural factors.
Visual acuity
A Snellen chart is an eye chart that can be used to measure visual acuity.
Snellen chart
An eye chart is a chart used to measure visual acuity comprising lines of optotypes in ranges of sizes.
Eye chart
The aspects of human vision that develop following birth include visual acuity, tracking, color perception, depth perception, and object recognition.
Infant visual development

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the acuō family

acute

acuity — used about once every 12,385 pages · #12,087 · point at the bar for the others

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