intimacy
noun
Simple meaning
Feeling or atmosphere of closeness and openness towards someone else, often but not necessarily involving sexuality.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
intuhmuhseeSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
ˈɪntəməsi
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
uncountablecountable
Feeling or atmosphere of closeness and openness towards someone else, often but not necessarily involving sexuality.
A feeling of being intimate and belonging together
countableespecially plural
Intimate detail, (item of) intimate information.
A usually secretive or illicit sexual relationship
countable
Intimate relationship.
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- C1 · Advanced
- Frequency
- Uncommon
- Typical Use
- Neutral / general English
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: Feeling or atmosphere of closeness and openness towards someone else, often but not necessarily involving sexuality.
Used this way, intimacy is a reasonably familiar word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. This sense is used where position and measurement matter — travel, weather and flight — so it reads as factual rather than emotive.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Neutral
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Moderately common
- Connotation
- Matter-of-fact
- Usage feel
- Neutral and straightforward
Where it naturally appears
- Geography/travel
- Weather/aviation
- Technical/specialist writing
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
Related Words
Connected to the same idea, not synonyms.
- affectionnoun
- attachmentnoun
- passionnoun
- desirenoun
- satisfactionnoun
- relationshipnoun
More about this wordSynonyms, forms, origin
Synonyms
Sense: feeling
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.