Fremednes

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The quality of being foreign, alien, or unfamiliar to one's own nature or experience
2. An archaic term for strangeness, or the condition of belonging to someone or something else
3. Unfamiliarity and remoteness, the sense of being an outsider or something unknown

Etymology: This is a Middle English spelling of a word built from the Old English adjective "fremde," meaning strange, foreign, or belonging to someone else. Its base survives in modern German, where "fremd" still means foreign or unfamiliar, and in Scots, but in standard English the adjective was largely replaced by "strange" and "foreign," which came in from French. The suffix "-nes" was the Old English ending for turning an adjective into a noun of state or quality, as in "goodness" or "darkness." Adding it to "fremde" gave a noun for the condition of being strange or of another's kind. Spellings varied widely in Middle English, so the same noun appears with different vowels and endings, and it fell out of use as "foreignness" and "strangeness" took over its role.