Learnedness

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The state of being highly educated and well-informed through extensive study and intellectual pursuit
2. The quality of possessing deep and wide-ranging knowledge typically gained by serious study
3. The condition of being well-read and intellectually cultivated due to dedicated learning

Etymology: "Learnedness" is about as plain as English word-building gets: it is "learned" with the suffix "-ness" added. The adjective "learned" comes from the past participle of "learn," so the noun is simply the state or quality of being learned. Its "-ness" ending is one of the oldest and most productive suffixes in English, the same one that turns "kind" into "kindness" or "happy" into "happiness," and it has long been used to form nouns for qualities. The more interesting story lies in "learned" itself, which has taken on a second life that "learnedness" inherits. As an adjective, "learned" describes a person of extensive scholarly knowledge, and it can also mean a work that shows such scholarship. Its pronunciation as a single syllable, "lernd," appears in the adjective but not in the verb "learned" used as the past tense, so the two forms can sound different even though they are spelled identically. The noun builds directly on the adjective sense, so "learnedness" names the quality of that scholarly depth rather than the act of acquiring knowledge.

Synonyms: knowledge, erudition, scholarship, wisdom, education

Antonyms: ignorance, illiteracy, naivety, unawareness, inexperience