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

proclivity

UK/pɹəʊˈklɪvɪti/US/pɹoʊˈklɪvɪti/
nounC2Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #12,523 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: proclivities

A proclivity is a natural leaning towards a way of behaving. A proclivity for risk, criminal proclivities, a proclivity towards it.

It is nearly always used of something unwelcome, which is what separates it from talent or aptitude. The Latin means sloping forward, so a proclivity is a tilt in one direction.

Definitions of proclivity

  1. 1nounproclivityA natural leaning towards a way of behaving.C2

    “He had a proclivity for exaggeration, so nobody believed his fishing stories.”

proclivity is a leaning.

Remember it

The Latin is sloping forward. A proclivity is the way you already slope before anybody pushes you.

hooks ontoslope

Where it comes from

Latin proclivitas comes from proclivis, sloping forward, from pro plus clivus, a slope.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *ḱley-

  2. Latin

    prōclīvitās

  3. English, today

    proclivity

Built from

  • prōclīvis · Latin — prone to

From Latin prōclīvitās, from prōclīvis (“prone to”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

proclivity in the wild

  • The basic setup is similar to the Asch conformity experiments, in which people showed a proclivity to agree with a group despite their own judgments.

    No soap, radio

  • Banks, and their married life is a happy one for the most part, though his proclivity for gambling sometimes gets him into trouble.

    Bingo Little

  • Gregor Strasser had previously broken with his brother over Otto's proclivity to act on his own.

    Black Front

  • Because of his proclivity to statistics, then Philadelphia Bulletin writer George Kiseda pinned the moniker of Super Stat on him in 1966.

    Harvey Pollack

  • Grape varieties with high proclivity to coulure are Grenache, Malbec, Merlot, and Muscat Ottonel.

    Coulure

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.