Literalnesses

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The quality of being strictly true to meaning without exaggeration or metaphor
2. The state of being exact and unembellished in interpretation or expression
3. A characteristic of conveying meaning without interpretation or figurative language

Etymology: "Literalnesses" is the plural of "literalness," which is simply "literal" with the suffix "-ness" added. The suffix is an old Germanic one: Old English "-nes" turned an adjective into a noun for a quality, so "good" became "goodness" and "literal" became "literalness." The adjective "literal" has a longer ancestry. It was borrowed into English from Old French "literal," which came from Late Latin "litterālis," built on Latin "littera," meaning "letter" of the alphabet. So a literal reading was originally one that sticks to the letters on the page, and the sense of exactness and lack of embellishment grows naturally from that idea. "Literalness" first appeared in English in the Middle English period, when "-ness" nouns were still being formed freely from adjectives.