Theyness

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The quality of being a separate group or collection of other people, set apart from oneself or one's own circle
2. The condition of belonging to others rather than to the speaker or the speaker's own group, especially in a social or philosophical sense
3. Otherness as a characteristic: the state of being those people who are not us and who stand apart from our own community

Etymology: "Theyness" is formed in English from the pronoun "they" and the suffix "-ness," which turns an adjective or pronoun into an abstract noun for a quality or state. "They" itself came into English from Old Norse "þeir" in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, replacing the Old English plural forms, so the word carries a Scandinavian pronoun at its core. Adding "-ness" to a pronoun is unusual, because the suffix normally attaches to adjectives such as "kindness" or "darkness." The noun is recorded in the sense of the quality of being other people, a collective otherness set against the self. It is a modern coinage rather than an old word, and its use is largely confined to philosophical and literary writing, where it names what the pronoun alone cannot: the strange, shared condition of being the many who are not me.