Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The state of being double or doubled.
  • noun Duplicity; deceit.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The state of being double or doubled.
  • noun Duplicity; insincerity.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The state of being double or doubled.
  • noun Duplicity; insincerity.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

double +‎ -ness

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Examples

  • But Garber's greatest strength is old-school close reading: she traces the idea of doubleness in "Macbeth" from the witches 'familiar incantation ( "Double, double, toil and trouble") to the hero's divided consciousness, and finding "The Tempest's" theme of cyclical repetition reflected even in the passing reference to Caliban's mother, the witch Sycorax, "with age and envy ... grown into a hoop."

    SHAKESPEARE 101: A+ 2007

  • In this way it came to pass that on the day of the Trial by Fire, the doubleness which is the pressing temptation in every public career, whether of priest, orator, or statesman, was more strongly defined in Savonarola's consciousness as the acting of a part, than at any other period in his life.

    Romola George Eliot 1849

  • Bain referred to this as the "doubleness" of concepts.

    VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol X No 4 1984

  • a kind of doubleness and want of keeping to the whole.

    Initial Studies in American Letters 1886

  • a kind of doubleness and want of keeping to the whole.

    Brief History of English and American Literature 1886

  • Said’s intellectual works hard to maintain a kind of doubleness — something akin, I think, to DuBois’ double consciousness in which African-Americans were compelled, he argued, to see society and the world as both Americans and simultaneously as Black people, this duality being a synthesis, and therefore greater than either perspective alone.

    TRUDGE TOWARD FREEDOM 2006

  • Said’s intellectual works hard to maintain a kind of doubleness — something akin, I think, to DuBois’ double consciousness in which African-Americans were compelled, he argued, to see society and the world as both Americans and simultaneously as Black people, this duality being a synthesis, and therefore greater than either perspective alone.

    June « 2006 « Bill Ayers 2006

  • First of all, he's a master of doubleness--or as comedy theorists call it, verbal equivocation.

    Aaron Belz: Literary Twitter: @thesulk Aaron Belz 2011

  • First of all, he's a master of doubleness--or as comedy theorists call it, verbal equivocation.

    Aaron Belz: Literary Twitter: @thesulk Aaron Belz 2011

  • First of all, he's a master of doubleness--or as comedy theorists call it, verbal equivocation.

    Aaron Belz: Literary Twitter: @thesulk Aaron Belz 2011

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