Other forms: curiosities
Curiosity is the itch to find out. It famously troubled the cat, and it is the reason anybody learns anything.
The word covers both the healthy kind and the nosy kind, and only the context tells you which. Idle curiosity is the harmless version, and intellectual curiosity is what teachers hope to find. There is a second sense meaning a strange object, so a curiosity shop sells odd old things and something can be a curiosity in itself. The proverb warns that curiosity killed the cat, though the usual reply is that satisfaction brought it back.
1nouncuriosityA strong desire to know or learn something.
“He opened the letter out of pure curiosity.”
2nounstrangeA strange or unusual object.
“The shop was full of curiosities.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Latin
cūriōsitātem
Anglo-Norman
curiouseté
Middle English
curiosite
English, today
curiosity
From Middle English curiosite, variant of curiouste, from Anglo-Norman curiouseté, from Latin cūriōsitātem, accusative of cūriōsitās. by surface analysis, curious + -ity. Displaced native firwitt.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA