Nonreferability

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The quality or condition of being unable or not suitable to be referred to someone or something else; the state of lacking transferability or relevance to another context; the characteristic of not permitting reference or citation
2. The state in which something cannot be directed or attributed to an individual or source; the attribute of information or material not eligible for mention or citation; the condition of being nontransferrable by referencing
3. A condition signifying the impossibility or unsuitability of assigning or directing attention elsewhere; the nature of being ineligible for use as a reference; the property of lacking applicability for attribution or citation

Etymology: "Nonreferability" is built from "non-", "refer", "-able" and "-ity", a plain English formation with no ancient ancestor behind it. The base is "refer", borrowed into English from Latin "referre" ("to carry back"), which gives the "-able" adjective "referable" ("capable of being referred or assigned to something") and, with the negative prefix, "nonreferable." The abstract noun form is the last step in that chain: "-ity" turns the adjective into a noun for the quality itself. The word is clearly a technical or academic coinage, the sort of term that appears in scholarly writing about sources, legal documents or classification rather than everyday speech. Its meaning, unfitness for citation, follows directly from its parts: a thing that cannot be referred to, or that a writer should not cite as an authority. Because it is formed transparently from existing English elements, its history is less a story of change than of combination. Each piece kept its original sense, and the meaning of the whole can be read straight off the parts.