Word.ws English Dictionary

ladiness

ladiness noun: the quality of being a lady.

Noun

ladiness (uncountable)

  1. The quality of being a lady.
    • Mother believed round garters cut off the circulation and caused varicose veins, so she kept me in a pantywaist several years longer than most boys. Nobody knew this except me and Mother, and I was particularly careful to keep it a secret because there was a touch of ladiness to a waist after a boy...1966, John Gould, Last One In: Tales of a New England Boyhood, a Gently Pleasing Dip into a Cool, Soothing Pool of the Not-So-Long-Ago, So to Speak, page 153
    • “Ladiness” is grounded in a rather rigid code of behavior that varies only slightly according to ethnic or cultural values.1990, Claudia Bepko, Jo Ann Krestan, Too Good for Her Own Good: Breaking Free from the Burden of Female Responsibility, page 18

Examples of ladiness in a sentence

  • Nobody knew this except me and Mother, and I was particularly careful to keep it a secret because there was a touch of ladiness to a waist after a boy got about so big.1966, John Gould, Last One In: Tales of a New England Boyhood, a Gently Pleasing Dip into a Cool, Soothing Pool of the Not-So-Long-Ago, So...
  • Furthermore, I clearly understood at the ripe old age of eight that Mother and Wheezie often strayed from the path of ladiness.1997, Albemarle:

Forms of ladiness

alternative formladyness

Origin of ladiness

From lady + -ness.

Questions about ladiness

What does ladiness mean?
Ladiness means the quality of being a lady.
How do you use ladiness in a sentence?
Nobody knew this except me and Mother, and I was particularly careful to keep it a secret because there was a touch of ladiness to a waist after a boy got about so big.
What part of speech is ladiness?
Ladiness is a noun.

Words near ladiness in the dictionary

  1. Ladik
  2. Ladiks
  3. ladilike
  4. ladily
  5. Ladin
  6. ladiness
  7. lading
  8. lading-can
  9. lading-cans
  10. ladings
  11. Ladinian

Source and license

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