Relevancy
Full definition of relevancy
Noun
relevancy
(countable and uncountable; plural relevancys)- (uncountable) The degree to which a thing is relevant; applicabilityIts answer little meaning, little relevancy bore. — Poe.
- (countable) A relevant thing.
- 1895, Mark Twain, S:Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences, To believe that such talk really ever came out of people's mouths would be to believe that there was a time when time was of no value to a person who thought he had something to say; when it was the custom to spread a two-minute remark out to ten; when a man's mouth was a rolling-mill, and busied itself all day long in turning four-foot pigs of thought into thirty-foot bars of conversational railroad iron by attenuation; when subjects were seldom faithfully stuck to, but the talk wandered all around and arrived nowhere; when conversations consisted mainly of irrelevancies, with here and there a relevancy, a relevancy with an embarrassed look, as not being able to explain how it got there.
- (legal, Scotland) sufficiency to infer the conclusion
Usage notes
In contemporary usage relevance is about 20 times more common in the US (COCA) and about 50 times more common in the UK (BNC) than this term.