- 1全體一致、無異議。開會投票時台灣講「全票通過」「無異議通過」，比「一致」更貼近這個字的嚴格程度
Unanimity is the state of everyone in a group agreeing — every single person, with nobody against. It is the noun that goes with the adjective unanimous.
It belongs to meetings, votes, committees, courts and boards. 'There was unanimity among the judges' means all of them decided the same way. You will also see 'a rare unanimity', 'complete unanimity', 'unanimity on the issue'.
Two details students find useful. First, unanimity is about the RESULT — everyone landed in the same place. It does not say they got there for the same reasons, and it does not say they argued about it or not. Second, it means everyone, not most. If nine agree and one does not, that is a majority, not unanimity. English is strict about this, unlike everyday Chinese 一致 which people sometimes use loosely for 'pretty much everyone'.
It is a formal noun, and honestly the adjective is far more common in real life: people say 'the vote was unanimous' much more often than 'there was unanimity in the vote'. Learn to recognise the noun in reading; use the adjective when you speak.
A quiet warning about the idea itself, which good writers play with: unanimity can mean everyone truly agrees, or it can mean nobody dared to disagree. Journalists often use the word with a raised for exactly that reason.
組成來自拉丁文 ūnanimus：ūnus（一）+ animus（心、精神），字面就是「一條心」；加名詞字尾 -ity（…的狀態）。有趣的是古英語本來有自己的說法 ānmōdnes（也是「一心」的意思），後來被這個拉丁字取代了。
原始詞典資料1 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，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。
unanimitynoun/ˌjuːnəˈnɪmɪti/
- 1
The condition of agreement by all parties, the state of being unanimous.
- Mankind were wrong, it seems, in concluding that all swans were white: are we also wrong, when we conclude that all men's heads grow above their shoulders, and never below, in spite of the conflicting testimony of the naturalist Pliny? As there were black swans, though civilised people had existed for three thousand years on the earth without meeting with them, may there not also be "men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders," notwithstanding a rather less perfect unanimity of negative testimony from all observers? Most persons would answer No; it was more credible that a bird should vary in its colour, than that man should vary in the relative position of his principal organs.
- Those responsible for preannouncing the Internet's hot new ideas are pushing Push with a ferocious unanimity.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。