Noun

The state or quality of being serious.

*, chapter=16

, title= The Mirror and the Lamp , passage=“[…] She takes the whole thing with desperate seriousness . But the others are all easy and jovial—thinking about the good fare that is soon to be eaten, about the hired fly, about anything.”}}

*{{quote-book, year=1963, author=(Margery Allingham), title=(The China Governess)

, chapter=18 citation , passage=‘Then the father has a great fight with his terrible conscience,’ said Munday with granite seriousness . ‘Should he make a row with the police […]? Or should he say nothing about it and condone brutality for fear of appearing in the newspapers?}}

* July 18 2012 , Scott Tobias, AV Club The Dark Knight Rises [http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-dark-knight-rises-review-batman,82624/]

Though Bane’s sing-song voice gives his pronouncements a funny lilt, he doesn’t have any of the Joker’s deranged wit, and Nolan isn’t interested in undercutting his seriousness for the sake of a breezier entertainment.

Noun

(dignities)

A quality or state worthy of esteem and respect.

* 1752 , (Henry Fielding), , I. viii

He uttered this ... with great majesty, or, as he called it, dignity .

* 1981 , African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights , art. 5

Every individual shall have the right to the respect of the dignity inherent in a human being.

* 2008 , Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH) [Switzerland]

'The dignity' of living beings with regard to plants: Moral consideration of plants for their own sake', 3: ... the ECNH has been expected to make proposals from an ethical perspective to concretise the constitutional term ' dignity of living beings with regard to plants. Dignity of Plants

Decorum, formality, stateliness.

* 1934 , Aldous Huxley, "Puerto Barrios", in Beyond the Mexique Bay :

Official DIGNITY tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.Columbia World of Quotations 1996.

High office, rank, or station.

* 1781 , Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , F. III. 231:

He ... distributed the civil and military dignities among his favourites and followers.

* Macaulay

And the king said, What honour and dignity hath been done to Mordecai for this?

One holding high rank; a dignitary.

* Bible, Jude 8.

These filthy dreamers speak evil of dignities .

(obsolete) Fundamental principle; axiom; maxim.

* Sir Thomas Browne

Sciences concluding from dignities , and principles known by themselves.