Word.ws English Dictionary

cruel-heartedness

cruel-heartedness noun: the quality of being cruel-hearted; lack of compassion and kindness.

Noun

cruel-heartedness (uncountable)

  1. The quality of being cruel-hearted; lack of compassion and kindness.
    • More tragical and more inscrutably mysterious than any mystic sight, human or machine, throughout the factory, was the strange innocence of cruel-heartedness in this usage-hardened boy.1855, Herman Melville, The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids

Forms of cruel-heartedness

alternative formcruelheartedness

Origin of cruel-heartedness

From cruel-hearted + -ness.

Questions about cruel-heartedness

What does cruel-heartedness mean?
Cruel-heartedness means the quality of being cruel-hearted; lack of compassion and kindness.
What part of speech is cruel-heartedness?
Cruel-heartedness is a noun.

Words near cruel-heartedness in the dictionary

  1. cruel
  2. cruel mistress
  3. cruel mistresses
  4. cruel-hearted
  5. cruel-heartedly
  6. cruel-heartedness
  7. crueler
  8. cruelest
  9. cruelest-hearted
  10. cruelhearted
  11. cruelheartedness

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cruel-heartedness (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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