Godcundnes

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The quality of belonging to God or to the divine, as found in an Old English religious text
2. The divine nature or sacred character that makes something belong to God
3. Godliness or the state of being divine, a term used in older English writing about sacred things

Etymology: Godcundnes is an Old English word meaning "divinity" or "divine nature," built from "godcund," an adjective meaning "divine" or "godly," plus the suffix "-nes," which forms abstract nouns from adjectives (the same ending that gives modern "goodness" and "darkness"). In Old English, "godcund" itself came from "god" (god) with the suffix "-cund," related to "cynn" (kind, nature), so the word literally sounds like "godkind" or "god-nature." The suffix "-nes" was the productive Old English way to turn a quality into a thing, and it survives in modern English as "-ness." The spelling "godcundnes" shows the older form before the nouns were standardized, when Old English writers had considerable freedom in how they spelled compound words.