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lenity

/ˈlɛnɪti/noun

lenity is a noun meaning “leniency, mercy, forgiveness” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled L-E-N-I-T-Y, and it appears about once in every 49 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of lenity is lenities.

What does lenity mean?

noun

  1. 1

    leniency, mercy, forgiveness

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce lenity?

  • /ˈlɛnɪti/

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Vealhurl-lenity.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of lenity

  • lenities plural

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is lenity?

Lenity appears about once in every 49 million words in written English, the 217,360th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Where does lenity come from?

Borrowed from Middle French lénité, from Latin lēnitās (whence -ity), from lēnis (“soft”).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).