faintness
English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]From Middle English faintnesse, feintnesse, equivalent to faint + -ness.
Pronunciation
[edit]Audio (Southern England): (file)
Noun
[edit]faintness (countable and uncountable, plural faintnesses)
- The property of being or feeling faint.
- 1591 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The First Part of Henry the Sixt”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act IV, scene i]:
- And he first took exceptions at this badge, / Pronouncing that the paleness of this flower / Bewray'd the faintness of my master's heart.
- 1738, David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature[1], Book I, Section 7:
- The confusion, in which impressions are sometimes involved, proceeds only from their faintness and unsteadiness, not from any capacity in the mind to receive any impression, which in its real existence has no particular degree nor proportion.
- 1859, Charles Dickens, chapter 6, in A Tale of Two Cities[2]:
- The faintness of the voice was pitiable and dreadful. It was not the faintness of physical weakness, though confinement and hard fare no doubt had their part in it. Its deplorable peculiarity was, that it was the faintness of solitude and disuse. It was like the last feeble echo of a sound made long and long ago.
- 1949 June 8, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter 3, in Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel, London: Secker & Warburg, →OCLC; republished [Australia]: Project Gutenberg of Australia, August 2001, part 1, page 1:
- The humming sound and the unvarying white light induced a sort of faintness, an empty feeling inside his head.
Synonyms
[edit]Translations
[edit]property of being faint
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