Other forms: capacities
Capacity is how much something holds or does before it is full. A kettle with a capacity of 1.7 litres, a hall that seats four hundred, a factory making every door it can make in a day.
With people it means workload, so you hear I have no capacity this week, the team is working at full capacity, and we are at capacity. It also means the power to do or feel something: the capacity to learn a language, a capacity for kindness, and in law mental capacity, which decides whether someone can make their own decisions. Then there is the role sense, where in my capacity as treasurer means acting in that job and no other. Filled to capacity is the set phrase for a room with no seat left in it. Capacious is the related adjective for the holding sense, a grand way of saying roomy.
1nounvolumeThe amount that something can hold.~56%
“The tank has a capacity of fifty litres and is nearly empty.”
synonyms: volume
2nouncapacityThe most that a person, machine or business can produce or handle.~19%
“The bakery runs at full capacity for the three weeks before Christmas.”
3nounabilityThe ability or power to do something.~13%
“Children have an enormous capacity for learning by copying.”
synonyms: ability
4nounroleThe role or position in which somebody acts.~12%
“She signed the letter in her capacity as head of the department.”
synonyms: role
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 16 sentences found in the wild and placed 16 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
capacity is a measure of how much is possible.
Capacity came through Old French capacite from Latin capacitas, from capax, able to hold much, and that from capio, to hold, take or understand. The Proto-Indo-European root kap- is about grasping, and English is full of its children: capable, capture, capacious. Even the mental sense keeps the old picture, since understanding is taking something in.
Proto-Indo-European
*kap-
Middle English
capacite
English, today
capacity
Built from
From Middle English capacite. From Middle English capacite, from Old French capacite, from Latin capācitās (whence -acity), from capāx (“able to hold much”), from capiō (“to hold, to contain, to take, to understand”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA