Plannedness

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The quality or state of being arranged or designed in advance; the condition of having organized intentions or steps prepared beforehand; the characteristic of exhibiting forethought and deliberate coordination
2. The attribute of having events or actions set out before execution; the measure of intentional preparation and systematic arrangement; the aspect of deliberate scheduling and premeditation in actions or ideas
3. The condition of purposeful arrangement and foresight; the degree to which something is methodically prepared or structured ahead of time; the expression of careful organization and advance planning

Etymology: "Plannedness" is a plain formation: the adjective "planned" (from "plan," which entered English in the 1600s from French "plan," meaning a ground plan or drawing, itself from Latin "planus," flat) plus the suffix "-ness," the Old English suffix that turns adjectives into nouns of state or quality, as in "kindness" or "darkness." Combining the two gives a noun for the condition of being planned. The word is much younger than its parts. "Planned" as an adjective dates to the 1800s, and the noun "plannedness" appears mainly in 20th-century writing, where it is used in discussions of urban development, economics, and social policy, for instance in contrasts between planned and unplanned cities or economies. Its earliest uses are often in the sense of how much forethought a thing received, rather than whether it happened at all. The noun is best understood as a useful abstraction. Dictionaries record it as a rarer word than "planning," and it tends to appear when a writer wants to measure the degree of deliberate arrangement in something rather than describe a specific act of planning.

Synonyms: intentionality, premeditation, foresight

Antonyms: spontaneity, improvisation, accident