- 1
A nonentity is a person with no importance, no power, and nothing that makes them stand out. In ordinary English this is the main use, and it is : you are saying they do not count. Writers use it about , offices, and fame — the colleague nobody listens to, the candidate nobody has heard of. There is an older, more sense too: a nonentity as a thing that does not really exist, a nothing. That sense is rare in speech. The word is fairly formal; in talk people are more likely to say a nobody. Though actually, calling someone a nonentity is often a power move, not a careful measure of their life.
無名小卒、無足輕重的人
組成non- (not), from Old English nān / Middle English non, plus entity, from Latin ēns (a being). The deeper tree runs through Proto-Germanic and Proto-Indo-European, but the living English pieces are non- and entity: a 'not-being', someone who barely counts.
同家族的字
- entitythe second piece: a being or thing that exists as a unit
原始詞典資料2 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
nonentitynoun
- 1
An unimportant or insignificant person or thing.
- The Queen Mother detests, but she dreads me—my uncle is indifferent, but finds me of use—our new Queen is already a nonentity—and Louis knows that my house is the most agreeable in Paris.
- Lord, lord, Carrados, the tragic monotony of your elderly professional nonentity! I've known men who've whispered to me between the pulls at confidential pipes that they've come to hate the streets and the houses and the same old everlasting silly faces that they met day after day until they began to think very queer thoughts of how they might get away from it all.
- 2
The state of not existing; nonexistence.
- New objects, new amusements, will occupy her mind; and unhappiness, equally unsuspected and unspoken, will die of its own nonentity.
- Gay men have no identity. They appropriate badly that of straight men who are all fucked up in the first place over thir ^([sic]) mythic masculinity stereotype. So, twice removed, the gay man flounders through life doubly fucked up dancing the dance of non-entity around the bright, burning flame of sex, power and upward mobility.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。