Other forms: enormities
Enormity is the shocking scale of something very wrong. Not size alone — moral scale.
This is one of the words careful writers fight hardest over. Strictly it means great wickedness, so the enormity of the crime is correct and the enormity of the task is disputed, since size alone should be enormousness. That word is so ugly that almost nobody uses it, which is why the loose sense has spread and dictionaries now record both. The safest course is to keep it for real wrongs.
1nounenormityThe extreme seriousness or wickedness of something.
“The enormity of what had been done took years to sink in.”
Enormity is being outside the norm. Latin ēnōrmis joins ex, out of, to nōrma, the carpenter's square that gives us norm, so the word first meant irregular and only later meant huge.
Latin
ēnormitās — irregularity; enormity
Old French
énormité — enormity
Middle English
ēnorme — monstrous or unnatural act; enormity
English, today
enormity
Built from
From Late Middle English ēnorme (“monstrous or unnatural act; enormity”), from Old French énormité (“enormity”), from Latin ēnormitās (“irregularity; enormity”), from ēnōrmis (“irregular, unusual; enormous, immense”) + -itās (suffix forming nouns indicating states of being). Ēnōrmis is derived from e- (a variant of ex- (prefix meaning ‘out; away’) + nōrma (“norm, standard”) + -is (Latin suffix forming adjectives from nouns).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA