sportfulness

Noun

sportfulness (uncountable)

1. playfulness
   • In long winter nights it was hard to tell who enjoyed sportfulness the better, the children who romped the floor, or the parents who, with lighted countenance, looked at them.1894, Rev. John Gerardus Fagg, Forty Years in South China
   • 'Sometimes,' he writes, in a characteristic letter, 'when I find myself transported with jollity and love of company, I hang lead to my heels, and reduce to my thoughts my fortunes, my years, the duties of a man, of a friend, of a husband, of a father, and all the incumbencies of a family; when...1917, Arthur Symons, Figures of Several Centuries