Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Direct or plain dealing.

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

  • noun The personal quality of being straightforward and direct in one's manner

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the quality of being direct and straightforward

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Add to this proud blindness the better quality of great downrightness in speaking the truth, and the love of fair play, on all occasions, and, moreover, the peculiarity which is alleged of the Englishman, that his virtues do not come out until he quarrels.

    Uncollected Prose 2006

  • Schilsky, in leaping down, pushed carelessly against him, he returned the knock so rudely and swore with such downrightness that, in spite of his hurry, Schilsky stopped and fixed him, and with equal vehemence damned him for a fool of an Englishman.

    Maurice Guest 2003

  • On the other hand, the Erewhonian system lends itself better to the suppression of that downrightness which it seems the express aim of Erewhonian philosophy to discountenance.

    Erewhon 2003

  • Even her gracefulness ran now and then into a downrightness of movement which suggested the assertion of a primitive sincerity in a personal world of many effects.

    Hilda A Story of Calcutta Sara Jeannette Duncan

  • Celtic literature is full of wonder, it is full of a tender magic and makes us feel the fairy charm of nature, although it has not the strength, the downrightness, we might say, of the English.

    English Literature for Boys and Girls

  • But there was more democratic outspokenness, more middle-class downrightness, and less of the Constitutional Club and drawing-room element in those ante-du Maurier days.

    The History of "Punch" M. H. Spielmann

  • He is generally honest, but more generally thought so, and his downrightness credits him, as a man not well bended and crookned to the times.

    Microcosmography or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters John Earle

  • The best of these came gladly to her, for she was an open and a disillusioned spirit, with something of a man's downrightness under her sensitive appreciation.

    The Collectors Frank Jewett Mather

  • Roosevelt was a man, for all his downrightness, of great natural dignity and of high breeding, though he had the good sense never, as it were, to affiché this good breeding to any man who might have misunderstood it and thought that he was being patronised.

    The Adventure of Living Strachey, John St Loe 1922

  • ” Nature in America is no longer so solitary, and perhaps no longer so ennobling, but much of this older simplicity, downrightness, courage, competence, unsophistication, and virgin prejudice still marks the national type.

    Chapter 2. James Fenimore Cooper 1921

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