Word.ws English Dictionary

whenceness

whenceness noun: the state or condition of being from somewhere.

Noun

whenceness (countable and uncountable, plural whencenesses)

  1. The state or condition of being from somewhere.
    • As we followed him along the street, he explained our whyness, whenceness, and whitherness to all the loafing children of the sun who inquired of him.1911, Outing: Sport, Adventure, Travel, Fiction - Volume 57
    • Rather, the term "absolute" is employed to call attention to the fact that in their immediate self-consciousness all men are aware of the radical "whenceness" of their entire existence.1971, Jerry H. Gill, The possibility of religious knowledge, page 56
  2. An unspecified location or condition from which something or someone has come.
    • The "wherefores and whenceness. "1898, Francis Bartow Lloyd, Lily C. Lloyd, Sketches of Country Life, page 175
    • No one knows how long it took the deep-sea canoes to reach Hawaii from New Zealand, or other whencenesses.1937, All about Hawaii, page 44

Examples of whenceness in a sentence

  • Biological whenceness blazoned ad oculos.2019, Leo Steinberg, Sheila Schwartz, Michelangelo's Painting: Selected Essays, page 10:
  • Elihu Neff's residence, in this township, and there was no accounting for the whenceness of their coming.1995, John Robert Colombo, Ghost Stories of Ontario, page 39:
  • Therefore we don't really know our minds, don't know what our intention or “whenceness” is unless we understand where it came from.2008, S. Brivic, Joyce through Lacan and Žižek: Explorations, page 116:

Forms of whenceness

pluralwhencenesses

Origin of whenceness

From whence + -ness.

Questions about whenceness

What does whenceness mean?
Whenceness means the state or condition of being from somewhere.
How do you use whenceness in a sentence?
Biological whenceness blazoned ad oculos.
What part of speech is whenceness?
Whenceness is a noun.
What is the plural of whenceness?
The plural of whenceness is whencenesses.

Words near whenceness in the dictionary

  1. whenceafter
  2. whenceever
  3. whenceforth
  4. whenceforward
  5. whencefrom
  6. whenceness
  7. whencenesses
  8. whencesoe'er
  9. whencesoever
  10. whencever
  11. whenceward

Source and license

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