Other forms: dignities
Dignity is the calm self-respect that keeps a person standing straight when things go badly. The old man who refuses help onto the bus and thanks you anyway; the candidate who loses, shakes hands, and does not cry on camera.
There is a larger sense underneath that one: human dignity, the worth every person has simply by being a person. It fills constitutions, hospital wards and care homes, in phrases like death with dignity and treated with dignity and respect. Dignified describes the manner, and undignified is the useful opposite — crawling under a table after a dropped phone is undignified. Something beneath your dignity is too lowly to stoop to, and to stand on your dignity is to insist, rather stiffly, on being treated properly. Older English used dignity for a high office or rank, and that sense still turns up in historical writing. You keep your dignity, lose your dignity, or leave with what is left of it.
1nounselfCalm, serious self-respect in the way someone behaves.
“She took the news with a dignity that silenced the room.”
synonyms: self-respect, poise, composure
2noundignityThe worth and respect that every human being is owed.
“The charity exists to protect the dignity of people living in hostels.”
3nounhighA high rank, title or office (dated).
“He was raised to the dignity of bishop that autumn.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
dignity is a quality of character.
Latin dignitās covered worthiness, merit, rank and office, from dignus, "worthy", and a Proto-Indo-European root *deḱ-, "to take" — what it is fitting to accept. It came through Old French dignité into Middle English dignyte and pushed aside the native weorþsċipe, which survives today as worship. Dainty is the same Latin word arriving by a different road, which is a strange pair for one ancestor to produce.
Proto-Indo-European
*deḱ-
Proto-Indo-European
*dḱ-nos
Latin
dignitās — worthiness, merit, dignity, grandeur, authority, rank, office
Old French
dignité
Middle English
dignyte
English, today
dignity
Built from
Middle English dignyte, from Old French dignité, from Latin dignitās (“worthiness, merit, dignity, grandeur, authority, rank, office”), from dignus (“worthy, appropriate”), from degnos, from Proto-Indo-European dḱ-nos, from deḱ- (“to take”). See also decus (“honor, esteem”) and decet (“it is fitting”). Cognate to deign. a doublet of dainty. In this sense, displaced native weorþsċipe, which became Modern English worship. It also displaced native Old English hād* (“honor, dignity”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA