Word.ws English Dictionary

ploverness

ploverness noun: the essence of what it means to be a plover; the qualities that make a plover what it is.

Noun

ploverness (uncountable)

  1. (nonce-word) The essence of what it means to be a plover; the qualities that make a plover what it is.
    • He has no problem with Graves painting “what he feels about what he sees,” but for Peterson, it just doesn't work with birds: “The critic will ask 'isn't it just the very essence of ploverness?' My answer is 'hardly; I know too damn much about plovers.'"2007, Douglas Carlson, Roger Tory Peterson: A Biography, University of Texas Press, page 200
    • The ploverness of this bird. One preened, another fed, most were just static, daydreaming.2017, Rosamond Richardson, Waiting for the Albino Dunnock: How birds can change your life

Origin of ploverness

From plover + -ness.

Questions about ploverness

What does ploverness mean?
Ploverness means the essence of what it means to be a plover; the qualities that make a plover what it is.
What part of speech is ploverness?
Ploverness is a noun.

Words near ploverness in the dictionary

  1. plovercrest
  2. plovercrests
  3. plovered
  4. plovering
  5. ploverlike
  6. ploverness
  7. plovers
  8. plovery
  9. plovs
  10. plow
  11. plow ahead

Source and license

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