Rawness

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The quality of food not cooked or processed ; the condition of something new or recent ; the state of inexperience or emotional sensitivity
2. A condition where something is uncooked or untreated ; the freshness or novelty of an item or situation ; the lack of maturity or refined skill in a person
3. The characteristic of being unprocessed, often referring to food ; the feeling of something recently created or introduced ; a display of emotional vulnerability or unfamiliarity with a situation

Etymology: Rawness is a plain formation: the adjective "raw" with the suffix "-ness", which turns an adjective into a noun for the quality it describes. The suffix has a long history of its own. It descends from a Proto-Germanic form, passed through Old English as "-nes" and Middle English as "-nesse", and it is one of the most productive ways English has of making abstract nouns from adjectives, as in "kindness" or "darkness". "Raw" itself has a much older Germanic pedigree, going back to the same kind of root that gave it the sense of uncooked or unprepared. Its basic idea of something in its natural, untreated state carries straight into "rawness". Here the word names the condition of material that has not yet been processed, whether that is a food, a fibre, or a piece of data.

Synonyms: crudeness, unrefinement, roughness, imperfection, inexperience

Antonyms: refinement, perfection, smoothness, polish, sophistication