fervency
Americannoun
noun
Etymology
Origin of fervency
1375–1425; late Middle English < Late Latin ferventia ( see fervent, -ency); replacing fervence < Middle French < Latin ferventia
Explanation
Fervency is an intense, passionate feeling. Your fervency for your favorite football team is clear from the way you jump around and yell as you watch their games on TV. When you intensely adore someone, you love them with a kind of fervency. Other fierce emotions, especially warm, positive feelings, can also be called fervency, like your fervency for rescue dogs or the fervency of a preacher's Sunday sermon. The Latin root of this word means "to boil" or "to glow," so when you experience an emotion so passionate that you feel like you're glowing — that's fervency.
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
We mourn and grieve, we miss those we’ve lost or said goodbye to, and we pursue both love and memory with such fervency that the rest of the world blurs.
From Salon • Nov. 27, 2025
Scores of university students on Wednesday marched to the parliamentary chambers in the capital, Kampala, to thank lawmakers for enacting the bill, underscoring the fervency of the bill’s supporters.
From Washington Times • Jun. 3, 2023
“Hugh! Hugh! STOP!” the people with the flashbulbs scream, with such fervency you’d think they were trying to stop him from stepping in front of a bus.
From Washington Post • Mar. 13, 2023
Perhaps it is the manner of Cantelli’s death, the waste of it, that explains some of the fervency of interest that has come to surround him.
From New York Times • Jul. 5, 2022
Few and short were the prayers he said, but what these petitions lacked in length they made up for in fervency.
From The Suprising Adventures of Sir Toady Lion With Those of General Napoleon Smith by Crockett, S. R. (Samuel Rutherford)
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
