Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

novelty

UK/ˈnɒvəlti/US/ˈnɑvəlti/
nounB2+Common in everyday speech and writing · #6,550 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: novelties

Novelty is the quality of being new, or a small cheap toy. The novelty wore off, a novelty item, novelty value.

The novelty wore off is the standard phrase and names the moment something interesting becomes ordinary. As a countable noun it means a cheap gift, which is a long way from the abstract sense.

A1AA1A · CC BY-SA 4.0

Definitions of novelty

  1. 1nounnoveltyThe quality of being new, or a small cheap toy.B2+

    “The Christmas crackers were full of little plastic novelties like whistles and rings.”

novelty is a quality.

Where it comes from

Old French novelte comes from novel, new, from Latin novellus.

  1. Latin

    novellus

  2. Old French

    novelté

  3. Middle English

    novelte

  4. English, today

    novelty

From Middle English novelte, from Old French novelté (Modern French nouveauté), from the adjective novel, ultimately from Latin novellus. by surface analysis, novel + -ty.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

novelty in the wild

  • From the initiation of short subject awards for 1932 until 1935 the terms were "Best Short Subject, comedy" and "Best Short Subject, novelty".

    Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film

  • In a controversy between status quo and new inventions, an appeal to novelty argument is not in itself a valid argument.

    Appeal to novelty

  • The opposite of an appeal to novelty is an appeal to tradition, in which one argues that the "old ways" are always superior to new ideas.

    Appeal to novelty

  • Humorous songs, or those containing humorous elements, are not necessarily novelty songs.

    Novelty song

  • A book on achieving an attention-grabbing novelty single is The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way), written by The KLF.

    Novelty song

1 / 2

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the novellus family

novelnovelty

novelty — used about once every 2,009 pages · #6,550 · point at the bar for the others