Gravitas

Gravitas is a Latin noun that, as a modern loanword, conveys a sense of substance or depth of personality.

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In an Ancient Roman context, the word gravitas communicated a sense of dignity, seriousness, and duty. Gravitas is one of the several virtues that Ancient Roman society expected men to possess, along with pietas and dignitas.

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It was popularized by the media during the summer of 2000, describing the Republican Party candidate, George W. Bush, as not having any, and Al Gore, the Democratic Party candidate, as having too much. After a month of heavy usage, the use of the word steadily dropped and disappeared. It is still used occasionally, mostly in biographical writing, and actually began to gain in popularity during the 2004 presidential election.

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Gravitas should not be confused with gravity, the force of attraction between massive particles.

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Latin: Latin is an Indo-European language originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. It gained great importance as the formal language of the Roman Empire. All Romance languages are descended from Latin, and many words based on Latin are found in other modern languages such as English. The ...

Noun: A noun, or noun substantive, is a word or phrase that refers to a person, place, thing, event, substance or quality. Nouns are parts of speech and can be classified in different ways such as proper nouns (e.g. "Janet") versus common nouns (e.g. "girl"), or collective nouns (e.g. "bunch", "herd"). N...

Loanword: A loanword (or a borrowing) is a word taken into by one language from another. A calque or loan translation is a related process whereby it is the meaning or idiom that is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword itself is a calque of the German Lehnwort....