Word.ws English Dictionary

gentilesse

gentilesse noun: courtesy, refinement; gentleness.

Noun

gentilesse

  1. (literary) Courtesy, refinement; gentleness.
    • […] nor loved he less / Stately lords in palaces, / Princely women hard to please, / Fenced by form and ceremony, / Decked by courtly rites and dress / And etiquette of gentilesse.1870, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude
    • Who bound thee to a body nothing worth, / And shamed thee much with an unlovely soul, / That the most strainedst charity of earth / Distasteth soon to render back the whole / Of thine inflamèd sweets and gentilesse?1913, Francis Thompson, "Love's Almsman Plaineth His Fare" in The Complete Poems of Francis Thompson, New York: Modern Library, no date, p. 252, https://archive.org/details/completepoemsoff00thomiala

Origin of gentilesse

From Middle English gentilesse, from Old French gentilesce.

Questions about gentilesse

What does gentilesse mean?
Gentilesse means courtesy, refinement; gentleness.
What part of speech is gentilesse?
Gentilesse is a noun.

Words near gentilesse in the dictionary

  1. genticides
  2. genticulate
  3. gentile
  4. gentiledom
  5. gentiles
  6. gentilesse
  7. gentilhomme
  8. gentilhommes
  9. gentilic
  10. gentilicia
  11. gentilicial

Source and license

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