Word.ws English Dictionary

bignesse

bignesse is the obsolete spelling of bigness.

Meaning of bigness

Noun

bigness (countable and uncountable, plural bignesses)

  1. (archaic) Size.
    • His [a hart's] head when it commeth firſt out, hath a ruſſet pyll vpon it, the which is called Veluet,[…]. When his head is growne out to the full bigneſſe, then he rubbeth of that pyll, and that is called fraying of his head.1575, Jacques du Fouilloux, “Of the Termes of Venery”, in George Gascoigne, transl., The Noble Art of Venerie or Hunting. […], London: […] Thomas Purfoot, published 1611, →OCLC, page 244
  2. The characteristic of being big.
    • It was big—and Babbitt respected bigness in anything; in mountains, jewels, muscles, wealth, or words.1922, Sinclair Lewis, chapter III, in Babbitt, New York, N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace and Company, →OCLC

Forms of bignesse

pluralbignesses

Questions about bignesse

What is bignesse the obsolete spelling of?
Bignesse is the obsolete spelling of bigness.

Words near bignesse in the dictionary

  1. bignay
  2. bignays
  3. Bignell
  4. Bignells
  5. bigness
  6. bignesse
  7. bignesses
  8. bignonia
  9. bignoniaceous
  10. bignonias
  11. Bignor

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bignesse (page history and authors); bigness (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “bignesse.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bignesse. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.