Addictiveness

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The quality of causing strong physical or psychological dependence on a substance or activity; the tendency to captivate or engross someone to an intense degree; the characteristic of fostering habitual use or engagement
2. The property of stimulating compulsive craving or reliance on a drug or behavior; the capacity to hold someone's attention persistently; the attribute of promoting continued and repeated use through appealing or reinforcing effects
3. The state of inducing uncontrollable habit formation or dependency; the strength in maintaining one's focus or interest compulsively; the feature of enabling persistent involvement due to pleasurable or reinforcing stimuli

Etymology: "Addictiveness" is a plain English formation: the adjective "addictive" with the suffix "-ness", which turns an adjective into a noun for a quality. The suffix itself has a long pedigree. It descends from Old English "-nes", which in turn traces back to Proto-Germanic roots with a sense of state or condition, and it has been used to form abstract nouns since the Old English period. Attaching it to "addictive" is simply the standard way English names the quality that makes something addictive. The base word "addictive" comes from "addict", which in English once meant someone bound or devoted to something, long before it came to mean a person dependent on drugs. Because "-ness" can be added to nearly any adjective, the noun is easy to build, and the result is a word that describes a property in the abstract rather than a single habit or substance.

Synonyms: habit-forming nature, dependency, compulsiveness, obsession, craving

Antonyms: nonaddictiveness, resistance, detachment