Adjective: privy
Comparison Forms
Synthetic
Perifrastic
| Comparative | more privy |
| Superlative | most privy |
Sample Sentences
-
The king retreated to his privy chamber.
-
the privy purse
-
Nonetheless, in the dark and privy stillness of our minds there are few of us who are not still haunted by worrisome doubts. [1967, William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner, Vintage, published 2004, page 82:]
-
He was privy to the discussions.
-
William understood Diana more but idealized her less. He was privy to her volatile love life. He knew the tabloids made her life hell, but he also knew she colluded with them. [April 5 2022, Tina Brown, “How Princess Diana’s Dance With the Media Impacted William and Harry”, in Vanity Fair:]
Adjectives inflected like privy
priest-ridden,
unreposed,
evadible,
dissentious,
dissentient,
unforesighted,
egocentrical,
unephemeral,
unennobling,
mensuralist,
flocculent,
unseductive,
whoopsy,
whooshy,
surrogate,
Nicodian,
unrepaired,
prismatoidal,
renorenal,
unseducible, etc. (List truncated at 20 adjectives)
Etymology
From Middle English pryvy, prive, from Old French privé (“private”), from Latin prīvātus (“deprived”), perfect passive participle of prīvō (“to bereave, deprive; to free, release”). Doublet of private. See: Latin Adjectives '
prīvātus'.