POPULARITY • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Popularity

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/pˌɑpjəlˈɛrəti/ Listen

noun

Popularity n. (pl. popularities)

The quality or state of being popular; especially, the state of being esteemed by, or of being in favor with, the people at large; good will or favor proceeding from the people; as, the popularity of a law, statesman, or a book. "A popularity which has lasted down to our time."

The quality or state of being adapted or pleasing to common, poor, or vulgar people; hence, cheapness; inferiority; vulgarity. "This gallant laboring to avoid popularity falls into a habit of affectation."

Something which obtains, or is intended to obtain, the favor of the vulgar; claptrap. "Popularities, and circumstances which... sway the ordinary judgment."

The act of courting the favor of the people. (Obs.) "Indicted... for popularity and ambition."

Public sentiment; general passion. (R.) "A little time be allowed for the madness of popularity to cease."

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Etymology of 'Popularity'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Popularity" Quotes from Famous Books

... that many thriving keepers of taverns and dram-shops were utterly ruined for want of business. But though this measure produced the desired effect in putting an extinguisher on the new lights just brightening up, yet did it tend to injure the popularity of the great Peter with the thinking part of the community; that is to say, that part which think for others instead of for themselves; or, in other words, who attend to everybody's business but their own. These accused the old governor of being highly aristocratical, and in truth there seems ...

— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving

... creed, that successful advertising endows a man with eternal life. Countless political quacks have been caricatured, advertised, and cinematographed into familiarity, but wise men still read Plato and Aristotle. The penny press has not convinced them that popularity is immortality; they recognize popularity as merely glory paid in pennies. They partake to some extent of the patience of the Oriental. They suspect, as most men of wide intellectual experience do, that the man who cannot wait must be a coward at bottom, ...

— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier

... waiting on time, but in a mood of far more pleasurable expectancy. Comus was one of the most junior of the prefect caste, but by no means the least well- known, and outside the masters' common-room he enjoyed a certain fitful popularity, or at any rate admiration. At football he was too erratic to be a really brilliant player, but he tackled as if the act of bringing his man headlong to the ground was in itself a sensuous pleasure, and his weird swear-words ...

— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki

... contest. The effect, indeed, produced upon the public by the irreverent sallies of Burke, and by the too evident triumph, both of hate and hope, with which he regarded the calamitous situation of the King, contributed not a little to render still lower the already low temperature of popularity at which his party stood throughout the country. It seemed as if a long course of ineffectual struggle in politics, of frustrated ambition and unrewarded talents, had at length exasperated his mind to a degree beyond endurance; and the extravagances into which he ...

— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore

... accordance with a principle which had called for much self-abnegation. She had considered it her duty to be a de Courcy and an earl's daughter at all times; and consequently she had sacrificed to her idea of duty all popularity, adulation, and such admiration as would have been awarded to her as a well-dressed, tall, fashionable, and by no means stupid young woman. To be at all times in something higher than they who were manifestly below her in rank,—that was the effort that she was ever making. But she had been a good ...

— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope

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