Indivisibilities

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The quality or state of not being able to be divided into smaller parts
2. The concept that denotes the nature of certain entities or objects that cannot be separated into distinct components
3. A characteristic describing elements that are whole and cannot undergo division without losing their essence

Etymology: "Indivisibilities" is the plural of "indivisibility", a noun meaning the quality of being impossible to divide. The singular comes to English through Middle French "indivisibilité", which was itself taken from Ecclesiastical Latin "indivisibilitas". That Latin form is built from "in-", meaning "not", and "divisibilitas", from "divisibilis", "able to be divided", the adjective from "dividere", "to divide". The plural form is the one that matters most in the history of the idea. Its use is strongly tied to medieval and early modern debates about whether matter is made of tiny parts that cannot be cut any further. Thinkers discussed "indivisibles" as hypothetical building blocks of continua such as lines, time and motion, and the plural of the noun naturally came to describe such properties in the abstract. The word therefore moved from a theological and philosophical vocabulary, where the Latin base was used to describe God and the indivisible soul, toward a more technical sense about the divisibility of physical things.