gayness
/ˈɡeɪ.nəs/
gayness noun: the state of being gay (colorful or festive); display or dressiness.
Noun
gayness (usually uncountable, plural gaynesses)
- The state of being gay (colorful or festive); display or dressiness.
- And truly, at a short butt, which some men doth use, the peacock feather doth seldom keep up the shaft either right or level, it is so rough and heavy ; so that many men, which have taken them up for gayness, hath laid them down again for profit:1545, Roger Ascham, Toxophilus; The School of Shooting, in Two Books, London: John Russell Smith, published 1866, →OCLC, page 124
- Let me ſpeak prowdly: Tell the Conſtable, / We are but Warriors for the working-day: / Our Gayneſſe and our Gilt are all beſmyrcht / With raynie Marching in the painefull field.1599 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Life of Henry the Fift”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount...
- The state of being gay (cheerful); gaiety.
- Synonyms:
- gayfulness, joy, blitheness, blithesomeness, cheerfulness, cheeriness, contentness, contentedness, delight, delightedness
- The state of being gay (homosexual); homosexuality; demeanor stereotypically representative of it.
- You cannot blame their gayness, their queerness, their homosexuality on sudden wealth.1940 January-June, Allen Bernstein, Millions of Queers (Our Homo America), [Unpublished MS of the United States National Library of Medicine], →OCLC, page 51
- Tell Al Sublette I met a great new pianist called Cecil Taylor, [he] plays like [Oscar] Peterson gone Classical, fast runs but Brubeck-Stravinsky-Prokofieff chords, a Juilliard classicist—He, like [James] Baldwin, [is] colored, [and] I think gay,—Baldwin is gay. I don’t dig all this gayness.1954 October 26, Jack Kerouac, “Jack Kerouac [Richmond Hill, New York] to Allen Ginsberg [San Francisco, California] Oct. 26, ’54”, in Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters, Penguin, published...
- Synonyms:
- homosexuality, gay, faggotry
Examples of gayness in a sentence
- Those of us who have been in heterosexual marriages too often have blamed our gayness on the breakup of the marriage.1970, Carl Wittman, The Gay Manifesto, New York: The Red Butterfly, →OCLC, page 4, column 1:
- Were there gay people in the ancient world, or is gayness a uniquely modern category?1999, John Corvino, Same Sex, page 185:
- Their goal was to compel open legal recognition of their beliefs about sex and gayness as being the law in the United States.2015, E. Reltso, Our Sex Saturated Society:
Synonyms of gayness
- gayfulness
- joy
- blitheness
- blithesomeness
- cheerfulness
- cheeriness
- contentness
- contentedness
- delight
- delightedness
29 more synonymsFewer synonyms
Forms of gayness
| plural | gaynesses |
|---|
Origin of gayness
From Middle English gaynesse, equivalent to gay + -ness.
Words that rhyme with gayness
Questions about gayness
- What does gayness mean?
- Gayness means the state of being gay (colorful or festive); display or dressiness.
- How do you use gayness in a sentence?
- Those of us who have been in heterosexual marriages too often have blamed our gayness on the breakup of the marriage.
- What part of speech is gayness?
- Gayness is a noun.
- How do you pronounce gayness?
- Gayness is pronounced /ˈɡeɪ.nəs/.
- What is the plural of gayness?
- The plural of gayness is gaynesses.
Words near gayness in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: gayness (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:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-gayness.wav.
Cite this entry: “gayness.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/gayness. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.