unpunctuality
English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]From un- + punctuality.
Noun
[edit]unpunctuality (countable and uncountable, plural unpunctualities)
- Not being punctual; lateness.
- 1814 May 9, [Jane Austen], chapter IV, in Mansfield Park: […], volume II, London: […] [George Sidney] for T[homas] Egerton, […], →OCLC, page 84:
- Thank you—but there is no escaping these little vexations, Mary, live where we may; and when you are settled in town and I come to see you, I dare say I shall find you with yours, in spite of the nurseryman and the poulterer—or perhaps on their very account. Their remoteness and unpunctuality, or their exorbitant charges and frauds will be drawing forth bitter lamentations.
- 1902, Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa, The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1[1]:
- Yule soon became so accustomed to the din as to be undisturbed by the noise, but the unpunctuality and carelessness of the native workmen sorely tried his patience, of which Nature had endowed him with but a small reserve.
- 1922, May Sinclair, Anne Severn and the Fieldings[2]:
- Thus he made a habit of long walks after dark on week-days and of unpunctuality at meals.
- 1943 March and April, T. F. Cameron, “The Preparation of Timetables”, in Railway Magazine, page 75:
- There is one golden rule of timetable work, that if a passenger train never runs to time it must be altered or other trains must be altered so that it can shake off its chronic unpunctuality.
- 1960 April, G. F. Fiennes, “Unpunctuality - the cause and the cure”, in Trains Illustrated, page 205:
- Thirty-one years ago I joined a railway in rather a hurry. My father's sudden death had just released the Metropolitan from the most persistent, accurate and belligerent critic of its unpunctuality. We were brought up in the belief that all trains ran to time before the war - the Kaiser's war.