privity

Definitions

1. A divine mystery; something known only to God, or revealed only in holy scriptures.
   countable, obsolete, uncountable
2. Privacy, secrecy.
   archaic, countable, uncountable
3. A private matter, a secret.
   countable, obsolete, uncountable
4. The genitals.
   archaic, countable, in-plural, uncountable
5. A relationship between parties seen as being a result of their mutual interest or participation in a given transaction, e.g. contract, estate, etc.
   countable, uncountable
6. The fact of being privy to something; knowledge, compliance.
   countable, uncountable

Examples

“But yet there is a place⟳ that men clepe the school of God, where he was wont to teach⟳ his disciples, and told them the privities of heaven.”

“Him oft and oft I askt in priuitie, / Of what loines and what lignage I did spring⟳[…].”

“Having ended the delights of nature, they were wont to wipe their privities [translating catze] with perfumed wooll.”

“There is no privity, (as the lawyers say⟳),—that is, no mutual recognition, consent and agreement—between those who take⟳ these oaths, and any other persons.”

“But this acknowledgement was made without the privity of his wife, whose vicious aversion he was obliged, in appearance, to adopt⟳.”

“This episode in her life, above all other things, was most cruelly suggestive to him, as possibly involving his father in the privity to a thing, at which Pierre’s inmost soul fainted with amazement and abhorrence.”

CEFR level