Definition of "nobility" []

• A class of persons distinguished by high birth or rank and in Great Britain including dukes and duchesses, marquises and marchionesses, earls and countesses, viscounts and viscountesses, and barons and baronesses: "The old English nobility of office made way for the Norman nobility of faith and landed wealth” ( Winston S. Churchill). (noun)
• Noble rank or status: Congress may not grant titles of nobility. (noun)
• The state or quality of being exalted in character. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• ""All my boyhood and youth I thought of the word nobility and what it meant," he wrote."
• "The stories of these ordinary men, what he called the nobility of ordinary people, always moved him so very much."
• "'In Japan there is what we call the nobility of failure."