Word.ws English Dictionary

keyness

keyness noun: the degree to which something is key, or important.

Noun

keyness (uncountable)

  1. The degree to which something is key, or important.
    • The keyness of a summarizing symbol derives from the relative fundamentality (or ultimacy) of the meanings which it formulates, relative to other meanings of the system.1973, Sherry B. Ortner, “On Key Symbols”, in American Anthropology, volume 75
  2. The statistical significance of a keyword's frequency in a given corpus, relative to a reference corpus.
    • This was one of the weakest keywords that was found, with a keyness of 24.9.2005, Paul Baker, Public Discourse of Gay Men, →ISBN, page 160

Origin of keyness

From key + -ness.

Questions about keyness

What does keyness mean?
Keyness means the degree to which something is key, or important.
What part of speech is keyness?
Keyness is a noun.

Words near keyness in the dictionary

  1. Keynesianism
  2. Keynesianisms
  3. Keynesianist
  4. Keynesianists
  5. Keynesians
  6. keyness
  7. keynote
  8. keynote speech
  9. keynote speeches
  10. keynoted
  11. keynoter

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: keyness (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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