totality is an entire amount taken as a single whole, and the quality or state of being total — wholeness — with a specialized sense for the phase of an eclipse in which the covering is complete.
The word carries two senses that are easy to blur. The first is quantitative: the totality of the evidence, the totality of a collection, meaning all of it with nothing left out. The second is qualitative: totality as wholeness, the condition of lacking no part. Philosophers and mystics lean on the second sense when they speak of the totality of being, and scientists lean on a version of it when they define a field by the full web of relations it studies — 📝Ecology, for one, is often described as the totality or pattern of relations between organisms and their environment. In astronomy, totality names the stretch of a solar or lunar eclipse when the disk is wholly obscured, a sense recorded in English by the 1840s.
The noun entered English in the 1590s, meaning "a whole, an aggregate," formed from total plus -ity or borrowed from French totalité and Medieval Latin totalitas. Total came earlier, in the late fourteenth century, through Old French from Medieval Latin totalis, "entire," and ultimately from Latin totus, "all, the whole, entire," a word whose deeper origin is unknown.
Totality is not the same as an 📝aggregate, which is a sum that keeps its parts countable; totality names the wholeness itself rather than the act of adding up. It overlaps with 📝universe, which is the totality of existing things in particular, and it is the noun behind a 📝wholistic approach, one that refuses to treat a system as less than all of it.
Totality is how I name the 📝One: the totality of all being. 📝One Alignments, our process of mutual alignment, was first called "surfing the totality."