massiveness
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English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]Noun
[edit]massiveness (usually uncountable, plural massivenesses)
- The property of being massive.
- 1896, Sarah Orne Jewett, chapter 2, in The Country of the Pointed Firs[1]:
- Her height and massiveness in the low room gave her the look of a huge sibyl, while the strange fragrance of the mysterious herb blew in from the little garden.
- 1914, H. G. Wells, “The Common Sense of Warfare” in An Englishman Looks at the World (U.S. title: Social Forces in England and America), New York: Harper & Brothers, § 2, pp. 163-164,[2]
- The progress of invention makes both the big ship and the army crowd more and more vulnerable and less effective. A new phase of warfare opens beyond the vista of our current programmes. Smaller, more numerous and various and mobile weapons and craft and contrivances, manned by daring and highly skilled men, must ultimately take the place of those massivenesses.
- 1920, G. K. Chesterton, chapter 11, in The New Jerusalem[3]:
- A Norman capital can be heavy because the Norman column is thick, and the whole thing expresses an elephantine massiveness and repose.
- 1958, Chinua Achebe, chapter 11, in Things Fall Apart, New York: Astor-Honor, published 1959:
- There was an oil lamp in all the four huts on Okonkwo's compound, and each hut seen from the others looked like a soft eye of yellow half-light set in the solid massiveness of night.