Word.ws English Dictionary

manlinesses

manlinesses is the plural of manliness.

Meaning of manliness

Noun

manliness (usually uncountable, plural manlinesses)

  1. (usually) The quality of being manly; the set of qualities, traits and abilities considered appropriate to men (as opposed to women or children); similarity to a man.
    • Nought under Heaven so strongly doth allure
      The Sense of Man, and all his Mind possess,
      As Beauty’s lovely Bait, that doth procure
      Great Warriors oft their Rigour to repress;
      And mighty Hands forget their Manliness,1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book V, Canto VIII”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, page 1
  2. (euphemistic, rare, usually) Male genitals.
    • Dressed only in flip-flops and a fuzzy blue bathrobe, which would be long enough on the mayor of Munchkin Land but on me is literally indecent, I attack the mower in a yanking frenzy, flailing around until the dramatic conclusion, wherein the mower refuses to start even though it is confronted by...2013 May 28, Doug Speirs, “Why you shouldn’t call me Mr. Fix It”, in Winnipeg Free Press
    Synonyms:
    manhood
  3. (rare, usually) Humanity, the quality of being human.
    • What might not have happened to men? What if cruelty had grown into a common passion? What if in this interval the race had lost its manliness, and had developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful? I might seem some old-world savage animal, only the more dreadful and...1895 May 29, H[erbert] G[eorge] Wells, “The Story Begins”, in The Time Machine: An Invention, London: William Heinemann, →OCLC, page 48

Questions about manlinesses

What is manlinesses the plural of?
Manlinesses is the plural of manliness.

Words near manlinesses in the dictionary

  1. manlike
  2. manlikeness
  3. Manlilinao
  4. manlily
  5. manliness
  6. manlinesses
  7. manling
  8. manlings
  9. Manlius
  10. manlock
  11. manlocks

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: manlinesses (page history and authors); manliness (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: “manlinesses.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/manlinesses. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.