Other forms: loyalties
Loyalty is staying on somebody's side when it costs you something. The friend who picks up at two in the morning, the supporter still in the stand at four goals down, the colleague who says nothing when talking would have been easy and profitable.
It takes to: loyalty to a friend, to a club, to a country. The plural does real work — divided loyalties, torn between two loyalties — for when you owe two people at once and cannot serve both. Businesses have taken the word over as well, so a loyalty card, a loyalty scheme and customer loyalty all mean coming back to the same shop rather than anything a person would call devotion. Keep it apart from obedience. You can obey somebody you despise; loyalty is chosen, and it shows itself most clearly at the moment when leaving would be the sensible thing to do.
1nounloyaltyThe quality of staying firmly on the side of a person, a group or a country.~81%
“His loyalty to the team never wavered.”
synonyms: faithfulness, devotion
2nounfeelingA feeling of duty or attachment to somebody, often one of several pulling different ways.~5%
“She was pulled between two loyalties.”
3nouncustomersCustomers' habit of coming back to the same shop or brand.~14%
“The card is there to build loyalty.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 157 sentences found in the wild and placed 131 of them on a sense (26 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
loyalty is a virtue.
Also accepted in games: faithfulness
LOY-alty → rhymes with BOY
A boy walks out of the gate to school and the dog sits down on the step. Rain, then sun, then rain again. The bus brings the boy back at four and the dog is on the same step.
hooks ontoboy
Loyalty is loyal plus -ty, and loyal came through Old French from Latin lēgālis — the very same Latin word that reached English by another road as legal. Loyalty and legality are one word split in two. It began as keeping to the law, and drifted into keeping to a person.
Old French
loialte
Middle English
loialte
English, today
loyalty
From Middle English loialte, borrowed from Old French loialte, loiauté (Modern loyauté) from loial + -té, equivalent to loyal + -ty.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA