Word.ws English Dictionary

eventness

eventness noun: the quality of not being utterly predictable; the specificity that characterizes an occurrence as meaningful.

Noun

eventness (uncountable)

  1. The quality of not being utterly predictable; the specificity that characterizes an occurrence as meaningful.
    • When the present simply actualizes what had to happen, events lack eventness.1994, Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time, page 22
    • Still, certain programmatic commitments [of avant-garde art] can be identified: championing the volatile eventness of corporeal performances, foregrounding themes, materials, and actions derived from any place or period save that of established art world, […]2013, Isher-Paul Sahni, “More than Horseplay”, in Studies in Popular Culture, volume 35, page 74

Origin of eventness

Coined by Mikhail Bakhtin as event + -ness.

Questions about eventness

What does eventness mean?
Eventness means the quality of not being utterly predictable; the specificity that characterizes an occurrence as meaningful.
What part of speech is eventness?
Eventness is a noun.

Words near eventness in the dictionary

  1. eventizing
  2. eventless
  3. eventlessly
  4. eventlessness
  5. eventlike
  6. eventness
  7. eventological
  8. eventologically
  9. eventology
  10. eventrate
  11. eventrated

Source and license

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