English

Noun

irrelevancy ‎(countable and uncountable, plural irrelevancies)

1. (uncountable) The quality of being irrelevant or inapplicable; lack of pertinence or connection.
2. (countable) A thing that is irrelevant—having no bearing on the subject of discussion.
   • 1895, Mark Twain, 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.

Synonyms

• irrelevance

Antonyms

• relevancy

Translations

References

• irrelevancy in The Century Dictionary, The Century Co., New York, 1911