2. Being within certain limits that define the range of general functioning: The normalcy that Helen's friends expected of her was that she would be calm during her medical crisis.
3. The quality, or condition, of being expected, as the general economic, political, and social conditions of a nation: After months of living in a state of financial tension, everyone yearned for a return to economic normalcy.
Normalcy is used primarily to denote a regular, healthy state of affairs, politically and economically. After the war, the country slowly returned to normalcy.
The term was used by U.S. President Warren Harding and the newspapers reacted violently because in the view of many of the President's linguistically conservative fellow citizens; especially, those in the writing or academic areas, normalcy was a "barbarism" used to replace the more acceptable normality.
Before his nomination, Warren G. Harding (Twenty-ninth president, 1921-1923) declared:
President Harding said he found the word normalicy in a dictionary, which probably was true, because it was apparently in dictionaries at the time. It is said to have appeared first back in the 1850s.
In the Oxford English Dictionary on a CD, it states: "Normalcy, Chiefly U.S. = normality"; from 1857, Davies and Peck Math Dictionary.
In The New Universities Dictionary (Based on the Original Foundation of Noah Webster); Edited by Joseph Devlin M.A.; World Syndicate Company, Inc.; New York; 1925; the following entry is shown: "normalcy, normality, n. state of being normal."