Word.ws English Dictionary

driness

driness is the archaic form of dryness.

Meaning of dryness

Noun

dryness (countable and uncountable, plural drynesses)

  1. (uncountable) A lack of moisture.
    • Dr. Khorana added that this is especially true of cleansers that feature surfactants like sodium lauryl sulfate, as this class of ingredients can cause “dryness, irritation and eczema.”2023 December 6, Jessica DeFino, “Too Many Products Can Stress Out Your Skin. Here’s How to Scale Back.”, in The New York Times
  2. The degree to which something is dry.

Forms of driness

pluraldrinesses

Origin of driness

From dry + -ness.

Questions about driness

What is driness the archaic form of?
Driness is the archaic form of dryness.

Words near driness in the dictionary

  1. drinabant
  2. drinamyl
  3. drincc
  4. drinck
  5. drincks
  6. driness
  7. drinesses
  8. dring
  9. Dringhouses
  10. dringing
  11. drings

Source and license

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