Word.ws English Dictionary

deerness

deerness noun: the state or quality of being a deer.

Noun

deerness (uncountable)

  1. The state or quality of being a deer.
    • Thus, he praised the work of the cave painters and their “contemplative intuition” in portraying the animals in their surroundings, in particular their illumination of the essential being of these animals, their “'deerness,'” for example.2001, Ross Labrie, Thomas Merton and the Inclusive Imagination, University of Missouri Press, →ISBN, page 36
    • In spite of the general features discussed above, the Filippovka stags remain enigmatic. That they were conceived of as supernatural is shown by their exaggerated features and their gold- and silver-foil covering, as well as by the fact that they are only realistic enough to indicate their...2006, The Golden Deer of Eurasia: Perspectives on the Steppe Nomads of the Ancient World, Yale University Press, →ISBN, page 55

Proper noun capitalized: Deerness

Deerness

  1. A parish in Orkney council area, Scotland
  2. A river in County Durham, north east England, a tributary of the River Browney with a course of 12 miles.

Origin of deerness

From deer + -ness.

The County Durham river name is derived from Proto-Brythonic, from Proto-Celtic *dubros (“water”) + *nesta, an ancient river-naming word.

Questions about deerness

What does deerness mean?
Deerness means the state or quality of being a deer.
What part of speech is deerness?
Deerness can be a noun or a proper noun.

Words near deerness in the dictionary

  1. deerlings
  2. Deerman
  3. deermeat
  4. deermice
  5. deermouse
  6. deerness
  7. Deerpark
  8. Deerparkian
  9. deerpox
  10. deers
  11. deershit

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: deerness (page history and authors); Deerness (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: “deerness.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/deerness. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.