badness

Noun

badness (countable and uncountable, plural badnesses)

1. The quality or degree of being bad.
   • The badness of a dignitary harm derives from the victim's belief that a perpetrator is willing to override or ignore her standing as a person with rights, with dignity, as evidenced by the wrongful criminal deed; […]2015, J. M. Bernstein, Torture and Dignity: An Essay on Moral Injury, page 140
   • It is easy to assess whether a sentence is acceptable or not: This is just how “good” or “natural” the sentence sounds to a group of fluent speakers of a language. The assessment that the badness is likely due to the grammar is a more complex inference.2025, Edward A. F. Gibson, “Preliminaries: Components of Language Structure” (chapter 2), in Syntax: A Cognitive Approach, MIT Press, →DOI, →ISBN, page 25

   Synonyms:

   bad manners, delinquency, devilishness, devilment, devilry, deviltry, disobedience, elfishness, goings-on, hanky-panky