Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The quality or condition of being different or of belonging to an outgroup.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The state or quality of being other; alterity.

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

  • noun The quality or state of being other or different; alterity; oppositeness.

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

  • noun uncountable The quality of being different or distinct.
  • noun countable The result or product of being different or distinct.

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

  • noun the quality of being not alike; being distinct or different from that otherwise experienced or known

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

other +‎ -ness

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Examples

  • Then, in a kind of mockingly Hegelian negation of negation, the very dimension of otherness is cancelled: one does it with oneself.

    The new feminists: lipstick and pageants 2008

  • Whatever that otherness is seems to come from somewhere deep within us.

    Sunday Reading 2007

  • And yet each of these forms of otherness is simultaneously overcome: the "slovenly wilderness" (which is already "Tennessee") is made to "surround" the jar in imitation of its roundness; the creaturely subject becomes a sovereign; and the static, spatial image of ekphrastic description is temporalized as the principal actor in a narrative.

    Ekphrasis and the Other William John Thomas 1994

  • I've already suggested that female otherness is an overdetermined feature in a genre that tends to describe an object of visual pleasure and fascination from a masculine perspective, often to an audience understood to be masculine as well.

    Ekphrasis and the Other William John Thomas 1994

  • Then, as Americans, they found themselves consigned to a perpetual state of 'otherness' - twice treated as strangers in their own land.

    Hamdan Azhar: Strangling Gaza and the Radicalization of Political Discourse 2010

  • Then, as Americans, they found themselves consigned to a perpetual state of 'otherness' - twice treated as strangers in their own land.

    Hamdan Azhar: Strangling Gaza and the Radicalization of Political Discourse Hamdan Azhar 2010

  • We publish even including the one-off collections, which are often not especially "otherness"-related only 17-18 stories and 20 poems per year.

    Archive 2005-07-01 2005

  • We publish even including the one-off collections, which are often not especially "otherness"-related only 17-18 stories and 20 poems per year.

    A Conversation with John Benson 2005

  • Where the legal definitions of childhood were constructed in order to protect children against working in the mines until their bones grew soft from lack of sunlight or weaving rugs until their legs were crippled from sitting and they were going blind, these same definitions have been used to create target groups for "otherness" - and ugly otherness at that.

    thinking with my fingers Torill 2002

  • The game broke down barriers, although the positive elements of "otherness" - the shared Judaism a lodestone - fostered a proprietary self-branding.

    Thestar.com - Home Page Rosie DiManno 2010

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