Word.ws English Dictionary

whistness

whistness noun: silence.

Noun (1)

whistness (uncountable)

  1. (obsolete) Silence.
    • Who dares cumber / This universall whistnesse; where none come, / But taciturnity, and silence dumbe?1657, Thomas Heywood, The General History of Women

Noun (2)

whistness (uncountable)

  1. (Devon, obsolete) Witchcraft; supernatural dealings.
    • [O]thers fancied — the natives notably — that there was some "whistness," or witchcraft, in the business; it might be, as they thought, the work of Dick Down, the old huntsman who was eaten by the Hayne hounds, and whose ghost was known to haunt the covers round the park.1883, Edward William L. Davies, A memoir of the Rev. John Russell, and his out-of-door life, page 159
    • Other more learned derivations have been suggested, but the whole place is steeped in “whistness” for on the open hillside above the oak copse runs the ancient Lych way, that ghostly Path of the Dead […]1982, Ruth St. Leger-Gordon, The Witchcraft and Folklore of Dartmoor, page 26

Synonyms of whistness

30 more synonymsFewer synonyms

Origin of whistness

From whist + -ness.

Questions about whistness

What does whistness mean?
Whistness means silence.
What part of speech is whistness?
Whistness is a noun.

Words near whistness in the dictionary

  1. whistling swans
  2. whistling up
  3. whistlingly
  4. whistlings
  5. whistly
  6. whistness
  7. Whiston
  8. Whistonian
  9. Whistons
  10. whists
  11. whit

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: whistness (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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