wordness
wordness noun: the quality of being a word or words.
Noun
wordness (uncountable)
- The quality of being a word or words.
- The move from purely descriptive, outward directive, writing toward writing centered on its wordness, its physicality, its haecceity (thisness) is, in its impulse, an investigation of human self-sameness, […]c. 1975–1984, Charles Bernstein, “Three or Four Things I Know about Him” (essay), in Content’s Dream: Essays 1975–1984, Northwestern University Press (2001), page 32
- Now, word-ness pertains to all words and is, therefore, regarded as a class (jati) and, so, it is said to be eternal.1980, Gaurinath Bhattacharyya Shastri, A study in the dialectics of Sphoṭa, page 11
- Synonyms:
- wordhood
Examples of wordness in a sentence
- Accuracy revealed a classic overall RVFA, an overall advantage of words over nonwords and an overall wordness …1988–1989, Brain and reading: structural and functional anomalies in developmental dyslexia with special reference to hemispheric...
- (Here for once she even includes a word butchered of its wordness to make possible the dreadful rhyme “trois/wha.”)1993, Ulla E. Dydo, A Stein Reader, Northwestern University Press, →ISBN, page 314:
- […] some independent stimulus variable (e.g., Wordness [words, nonwords] in a lexical decision task or Decision [global, local] in a hierarchic perception task) […]1995, Fran Zaidel, "Interhemispheric Transfer in the Split Brain: Long-term Status Following Complete Cerebral Commissurotomy", chapter 17...
Synonyms of wordness
Origin of wordness
From word + -ness.
Questions about wordness
- What does wordness mean?
- Wordness means the quality of being a word or words.
- How do you use wordness in a sentence?
- Accuracy revealed a classic overall RVFA, an overall advantage of words over nonwords and an overall wordness …
- What part of speech is wordness?
- Wordness is a noun.
Words near wordness in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: wordness (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.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “wordness.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/wordness. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.