The Rice University Neologisms Database

Capable of being perceived very easily; incredibly obvious. People oftentimes say things that are incredibly obvious, and one wonders why they even bothered pointing them out at all. To make fun of people who do this, my friend coined the term “obvii.” The word was formed for a reason similar to the reason for which “ease” was formed (ease being formed before “obvii”), though the words were coined by two different friends. Obvii emphasizes that something is very obvious because it is a pseudo-plural of the word “obvious.” The plurals of words that end in –us in the singular are often formed by changing -us to –i because in Latin, masculine singular first-declension words end in –us and masculine plural first declension words end in –i. In this case, after the word “obvious” became “obvioi” through pluralization, the “o” was clipped to create a word that was more easily pronounceable and more aesthetically pleasing orthographically.