constancy

/ˈkɑnstənsi/

Other forms: constancies

Something or someone that never changes, that stays the course, and that is more like a rock than a leaf blowing in the wind shows constancy.

Have you ever noticed how some people change their minds every day? Someone like that isn't showing constancy. In parts of the world where the weather changes frequently, the weather has no constancy, whereas in San Francisco, where it's about 70 and mild for ten months of the year, the weather has constancy. If you take constancy — a good thing — too far, you have stubbornness — an undesirable quality.

Definitions of constancy

1. noun

   the quality of being enduring and free from change or variation
   “early mariners relied on the constancy of the trade winds”

   synonyms: stability

   antonyms:

   inconstancy

   the quality of being changeable and variable

   types:

   invariance

   the nature of a quantity or property or function that remains unchanged when a given transformation is applied to it

   metastability

   the quality of a physical system that persists in its existing equilibrium when undisturbed (or only slightly disturbed) but able to pass to a more stable equilibrium when sufficiently disturbed

   monotony

   constancy of tone or pitch or inflection

   type of:

   changelessness, unchangeability, unchangeableness, unchangingness

   the quality of being unchangeable; having a marked tendency to remain unchanged
2. noun

   faithfulness and dependability in personal attachments (especially sexual fidelity)
   type of:

   faithfulness, fidelity

   the quality of being faithful
3. noun

   (psychology) the tendency for perceived objects to give rise to very similar perceptual experiences in spite of wide variations in the conditions of observation
   synonyms: perceptual constancy

   types:

   brightness constancy

   the tendency for a visual object to be perceived as having the same brightness under widely different conditions of illumination

   color constancy, colour constancy

   the tendency for a color to look the same under widely different viewing conditions

   shape constancy

   the tendency to perceive the shape of a rigid object as constant despite differences in the viewing angle (and consequent differences in the shape of the pattern projected on the retina of the eye)

   size constancy

   the tendency to perceive the veridical size of a familiar object despite differences in their distance (and consequent differences in the size of the pattern projected on the retina of the eye)

   type of:

   perception

   the process of perceiving