Word.ws English Dictionary

archness

archness noun: the state of being arch.

Noun

archness (countable and uncountable, plural archnesses)

  1. The state of being arch.
    • Marianne was surprised and confused, yet she could not help smiling at the quiet archness of his manner1811, Jane Austen, chapter 18, in Sense and Sensibility
    • Meanwhile the farce was going on very successfully, and Mrs. Leary, in a hussar jacket and braided pantaloons, was enchanting the audience with her archness, her lovely figure, and her delightful ballads.1848 November – 1850 December, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter 29, in The History of Pendennis. […], volume (please specify |volume=I or II), London: Bradbury and Evans, […], published...

Forms of archness

pluralarchnesses

Origin of archness

From arch (“principal; primary; mischievous”, adjective) + -ness.

Questions about archness

What does archness mean?
Archness means the state of being arch.
What part of speech is archness?
Archness is a noun.
What is the plural of archness?
The plural of archness is archnesses.

Words near archness in the dictionary

  1. archmurderers
  2. archnationalist
  3. archnationalists
  4. archnemeses
  5. archnemesis
  6. archness
  7. archnesses
  8. archo-
  9. archologies
  10. archology
  11. archon

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: archness (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: “archness.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/archness. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.