Word.ws English Dictionary

out-of-placeness

out-of-placeness noun: the state or quality of being out of place.

Noun

out-of-placeness (uncountable)

  1. The state or quality of being out of place.
    • The task of fantastic linguistics is to locate the glossophiles in the wider context of knowledge by questioning why and how they failed to construct the authentic objects of the modern linguistics. By virtue of their out-of-placeness they illuminate the limits of scientific discourse by blurring...2003, Shuhei Hosokawa, “Speaking in the Tongue of the Antipode: Japanese Brazilian Fantasy on the Origin of Language”, in Jeffrey Lesser, editor, Searching for Home Abroad: Japanese Brazilians and...
    • During the last ice-age, massive stones were carried for miles by the scouring glaciers, only to be left, like passengers at the end of the line, when the glaciers retreated. Stranded in their new surroundings with rocks with which they share no common geology, their out-of-place-ness is evoked by...2015 May 4, Dominick Tyler, “10 UK landscape features that you’ve probably never heard of”, in The Guardian

Examples of out-of-placeness in a sentence

  • By virtue of their out-of-placeness they illuminate the limits of scientific discourse by blurring and bypassing the boundary between science and fantasy.2003, Shuhei Hosokawa, “Speaking in the Tongue of the Antipode: Japanese Brazilian Fantasy on the Origin of Language”, in Jeffrey Lesser...
  • The sheer out-of-placeness of this poor juvenile stranded in death without the sea in sight is even more disconcerting than a pod of whales washed up on a beach or a lone cetacean in the Thames.2019 February 26, Jonathan Jones, “Why we can’t help but see the whale in the forest as an omen”, in The Guardian:

Origin of out-of-placeness

From out of place + -ness.

Questions about out-of-placeness

What does out-of-placeness mean?
Out-of-placeness means the state or quality of being out of place.
How do you use out-of-placeness in a sentence?
By virtue of their out-of-placeness they illuminate the limits of scientific discourse by blurring and bypassing the boundary between science and fantasy.
What part of speech is out-of-placeness?
Out-of-placeness is a noun.

Words near out-of-placeness in the dictionary

  1. out-of-doors
  2. out-of-office
  3. out-of-offices
  4. out-of-order
  5. out-of-place
  6. out-of-placeness
  7. out-of-pocket
  8. out-of-print
  9. out-of-process
  10. out-of-school learning
  11. out-of-school suspension

Source and license

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