Fictitiousness

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The quality or state of being invented or fabricated rather than real or true; the characteristic of existing only in imagination or as a falsehood; the condition of lacking basis in fact or reality
2. The condition of something being created or imagined and not based on actual events or truth; the attribute of something that is unreal and solely a product of the mind; the state of falseness or artificiality
3. The nature of something as invented or contrived, not genuine or factual; the trait of existing purely as a narrative or fictional concept; the circumstance of lacking authenticity or actuality

Etymology: Fictitiousness is a plain English formation: the adjective "fictitious" with the suffix "-ness" added to turn a quality into a noun. The adjective itself comes from the Latin "fictīcius", a derivative of "fictus", the past participle of "fingere", "to shape, form, feign or invent". The root carries the same idea of shaping that gives English "fiction" and "figment", so a thing that is fictitious is, at root, something that has been shaped by hand rather than found in the world. The suffix does the rest of the work. Old English "-nes" attached to adjectives to form abstract nouns, and it became Middle English "-nesse" and then the modern "-ness", which English still applies freely to almost any adjective. "Fictitiousness" therefore names the state of being made up, or the quality that makes something seem invented, and it is the abstract noun that a sentence needs when the adjective alone would be awkward.

Synonyms: falseness, fabrication, unreality, fictionality

Antonyms: truth, reality, authenticity