Straungenesse

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The quality of being unfamiliar, foreign, or out of the ordinary, as found in an archaic English spelling of strangeness
2. The condition of seeming alien or unknown to one's own experience, a Middle English term for oddness and foreignness
3. Archaic English for the unfamiliarity or oddness that makes a person, place, or thing seem foreign and unusual

Etymology: "Straungenesse" is a Middle English noun formed from "straunge," meaning foreign, unfamiliar or strange, which came into English from Old French "estrange" (modern French "étrange"), itself from Latin "extraneus," meaning "outside, foreign, external," built on "extra," "outside." The root sense is spatial, not psychological: something strange was simply from elsewhere, and the word's earliest meanings concern foreigners and outsiders before they came to mean odd or surprising. The suffix "-nesse" is the Middle English abstract ending, the same one that gives us modern "-ness," so the word means roughly "the quality or state of being strange." Middle English writers built many such nouns from adjectives, and this one names the quality of seeming foreign to one's own experience, an unfamiliarity felt from within rather than merely an outsider's status.