Brininess

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The quality of being salty like seawater due to dissolved salt content
2. A characteristic salty taste or flavor commonly found in ocean water
3. The state or condition of having a high concentration of salt in a liquid such as seawater

Etymology: Brininess is a plain formation: the adjective "briny" with the suffix "-ness" attached to turn it into a noun for a quality. The adjective itself goes back to Old English "brine," which meant salt water or the sea, and "briny" came to describe that saltiness. Its earlier ancestry runs back through the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family, where the roots carried the sense of something salted or sharp to the taste. The suffix does most of the work here. Old English "-nes" turned adjectives into nouns of quality, and it developed into the modern "-ness" that English now uses freely, so "good" becomes "goodness" and "dark" becomes "darkness." Brininess follows that pattern exactly, naming the state of being briny rather than the briny thing itself.

Synonyms: saltiness

Antonyms: freshness