Word.ws English Dictionary

itness

itness noun: existence as a particular (type of) thing with particular qualities.

Noun

itness (uncountable)

  1. Existence as a particular (type of) thing with particular qualities.
    • You see, Uncle, it isn't anything to do with anything, being in love with a person—no matter how soppy it may sound to you in your wisdom. It's just a sort of Itness to do with one another and it won't work under any form of substitution.1934, Ernest Bramah, The Bravo of London
    • Theatricality is foregrounded in the simple moment of pointing to an absence, as in the mask that points to itself as it advances. In this moment the itness of the I shows itself as what it is not in the act of self-reference.1991, Barbara Freedman, Staging the Gaze

Examples of itness in a sentence

  • This script declares: the universe is so right as to need no justification, existence is no longer a problem because of the 'itness' of everything, the whole world had become your own body […]1992, Stanley Cohen, Laurie Taylor, Escape Attempts: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Everyday Life:
  • The beauty of the book is in the book, in its itness and in the itness of the author who, in looking through is also seen in the pane, the lens, on which she leaves her own print.2012, Cindy Weinstein, Christopher Looby, American Literature's Aesthetic Dimensions, page 285:

Origin of itness

From it + -ness.

Questions about itness

What does itness mean?
Itness means existence as a particular (type of) thing with particular qualities.
How do you use itness in a sentence?
This script declares: the universe is so right as to need no justification, existence is no longer a problem because of the 'itness' of everything, the whole world had become your own body […]
What part of speech is itness?
Itness is a noun.

Words near itness in the dictionary

  1. ITMA
  2. itmo
  3. ITMR
  4. ITN
  5. Itneg
  6. itness
  7. ItNuxalkmc
  8. ITO
  9. Itogon
  10. Itoigawa
  11. itoigawaite

Source and license

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