AWFULNESS

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does awfulness mean? 

• AWFULNESS (noun)
  The noun AWFULNESS has 1 sense:

1. a quality of extreme unpleasantness

  Familiarity information: AWFULNESS used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• AWFULNESS (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A quality of extreme unpleasantness

Classified under:

Nouns denoting attributes of people and objects

Synonyms:

awfulness; dreadfulness; horridness; terribleness

Hypernyms ("awfulness" is a kind of...):

unpleasantness (the quality of giving displeasure)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "awfulness"):

frightfulness (the quality of being frightful)

Derivation:

awful (causing fear or dread or terror)

awful (exceptionally bad or displeasing)

awful (offensive or even (of persons) malicious)

 Context examples 

He cowered in the midst of the milky water, as though the vastness were pressing in upon him with overwhelming force, brutally crushing him with its complacent awfulness.

(Love of Life and Other Stories, by Jack London)

But there was little time for laughter in those days, what of our heavy work and of the awfulness of Wolf Larsen’s living death.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

The wind roared down the chimney, the rain beat in torrents against the windows, and everything seemed to speak the awfulness of her situation.

(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)

There was the awfulness of retribution about it.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

Then it was that the cruelty of the sea, its relentlessness and awfulness, rushed upon me.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)