aboutness
US/əˈbaʊt.nəs/
aboutness noun: the relevance of a text to its reader.
Noun
aboutness (countable and uncountable, plural aboutnesses)
- The relevance of a text to its reader.
- The experience of attending to how a good film works is a matter of understanding the composition and the inexhaustible flow of "aboutnesses," relevancies to the world that emerge from the interaction of qualities of meaningfulness that attend such a web of forms and connotations, such a design.1982, William Cadbury, Leland A. Poague, Film Criticism: A Counter Theory, →ISBN, page 19
- Movie critics provide a good example of aboutness judgments. When some critics rave and others pan, it is not because they have seen different physical texts; rather, all the technical knowledge, topical knowledge, emotions and beliefs of each critic are being engaged in the construction of a...1996, Brian C. O'Connor, Explorations in Indexing and Abstracting, →ISBN, page 147
Forms of aboutness
| plural | aboutnesses |
|---|
Origin of aboutness
From about + -ness.
Questions about aboutness
- What does aboutness mean?
- Aboutness means the relevance of a text to its reader.
- What part of speech is aboutness?
- Aboutness is a noun.
- How do you pronounce aboutness?
- Aboutness is pronounced /əˈbaʊt.nəs/ (US).
- What is the plural of aboutness?
- The plural of aboutness is aboutnesses.
Words near aboutness in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: aboutness (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “aboutness.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/aboutness. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.