Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Secondary or subordinate character, quality, or position.

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

  • noun The state of being secondary.

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

  • noun The state of being secondary.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

secondary +‎ -ness

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Examples

  • In Kant's critical system, the aesthetic does not come in the first place but the third, as the subject matter of the Critique of Judgement or Third Critique, and yet this third position acquires in the end a kind of firstness or at least secondariness.

    Subjecticity (On Kant and the Texture of Romanticism) 2005

  • Is there something questionable about their secondariness?

    "Homosexual" relationships in antiquity 2006

  • Phoebe, who was reckoned less clever than Alice, excites a great deal more sympathy, quietly accepting a position of admiring secondariness, and yielding occasional good things in wit or poetry: she was famed among her friends as a punster and parodist, and once answered at a dinner to a question what wine they used, "Oh, we drink Heidsick, but we keep mum."

    Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 Various

  • And from the start I will say that the very instinct of secondariness, so often postulated as a reason for the social subjection of women, is, on the part of those who urge it, either an invention or an error.

    History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II Matilda Joslyn Gage 1862

  • There must not be secondariness, and 'tis a thousand to one that her air and manner will at once betray that she is not primary, but that there is some other one or many of her class, to whom she habitually postpones herself.

    The Conduct of Life (1860) 1856

  • An editorial in the Indian Express titled "Nobody's Child" addresses the "secondariness" that girl children feel, in response to a report that hundreds of parents in a district of Maharashtra had named their daughters Nakushi, or "Unwanted."

    NYT > Home Page By PAMPOSH RAINA 2011

  • To "change that sense of suffering and secondariness that girl children go through, we need to design imaginative public policy at every step of the way, to change that disempowering calculus altogether," the editorial reads The Indian Express.

    NYT > Home Page By PAMPOSH RAINA 2011

  • An editorial in the Indian Express titled "Nobody's Child" addresses the "secondariness" that girl children feel, in response to a report that hundreds of parents in a district of Maharashtra had named their daughters Nakushi, or "Unwanted."

    NYT > Home Page By PAMPOSH RAINA 2011

  • To "change that sense of suffering and secondariness that girl children go through, we need to design imaginative public policy at every step of the way, to change that disempowering calculus altogether," the editorial reads The Indian Express.

    NYT > Home Page By PAMPOSH RAINA 2011

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