Word.ws English Dictionary

femmeness

femmeness noun: the state or quality of being femme.

Noun

femmeness (uncountable)

  1. The state or quality of being femme.
    • What is the appeal of femmeness since it doesn't have the obvious attractions of maleness, i.e. power and privilege, associated with it?1989, Sheila Jeffreys, “Butch and Femme: Now and then”, in Not a Passing Phase: Reclaiming Lesbians in History 1840-1985, page 180
    • Some femmes share heterosexual pasts, some pass through butchness before they arrive at femmeness, some move back and forth between boy identities and woman identities.1998, Sally Munt, Cherry Smyth, Butch/femme: Inside Lesbian Gender, page 61

Origin of femmeness

From femme + -ness.

Questions about femmeness

What does femmeness mean?
Femmeness means the state or quality of being femme.
What part of speech is femmeness?
Femmeness is a noun.

Words near femmeness in the dictionary

  1. femme-y
  2. femmed
  3. femmefan
  4. femmefans
  5. femmefen
  6. femmeness
  7. femmephobia
  8. femmephobic
  9. femmer
  10. femmes
  11. femmes fatales

Source and license

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