Innocuousness

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ɪˈnɒk.ju.əs.nəs/

Definitions

1. The condition of being free from harm and causing no negative impact on others or the environment
2. The quality of producing no injury or offense to people or surroundings
3. A characteristic of causing no damage, irritation, or adverse reaction

Etymology: "Innocuousness" is a plain English formation: the adjective "innocuous" with the suffix "-ness" added to turn it into a noun for a quality. Its root is the Latin "innocuus," built from the negating prefix "in-" and "nocuus," meaning "harmful," from "nocere," "to harm." So the core idea of the word is simply the absence of harm, and it is a noun that names how harmless something is. The suffix does the grammatical work here. "-ness" comes from Old English "-nes," a suffix that was attached to adjectives to form nouns of quality, as in "kindness" or "darkness." Its ancestry runs back through Proto-Germanic and Proto-Indo-European, but English speakers have used it productively for over a thousand years, which is why almost any adjective can be turned into a noun this way.

Synonyms: harmlessness, safety, inoffensiveness, innocence, benignity

Antonyms: harmfulness, danger, malice, offensiveness, malevolence