Word.ws English Dictionary

thingness

thingness noun: the quality of a material thing; objectivity; actuality; reality.

Noun

thingness (usually uncountable, plural thingnesses)

  1. (usually) The quality of a material thing; objectivity; actuality; reality.
    • To live as a thing, to live for another and as the other expects, is to live unauthentically or in bad faith. To be true to oneself, one must reduce others to thingness and resist being so reduced.1994, Shadia B Drury, Alexandre Kojève http://books.google.com/books?ie=UTF-8&hl=en&vid=ISBN0312120923&id=zQRKXLwDPc4C&pg=PA26&lpg=PA26&sig=zR0NpFT9gF4Mo_VTIPTm1274piI
    • Whether we dwell in the thingness of fixity or the thingness of wujūd, we are “at” the wujūd of the Real.1998, William C Chittick, The Self-Disclosure of God

Forms of thingness

pluralthingnesses

Origin of thingness

From thing + -ness.

Questions about thingness

What does thingness mean?
Thingness means the quality of a material thing; objectivity; actuality; reality.
What part of speech is thingness?
Thingness is a noun.
What is the plural of thingness?
The plural of thingness is thingnesses.

Words near thingness in the dictionary

  1. thingman
  2. thingmen
  3. thingmies
  4. thingmy
  5. Thingnam
  6. thingness
  7. thingnesses
  8. thingo
  9. thingodontan
  10. thingodontans
  11. Thingom

Source and license

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