Unmeasurableness

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The quality of being too great, vast, or infinite to be quantified or determined with precision
2. The state of being impossible to quantify due to excessive vastness or boundlessness
3. A characteristic of something that cannot be accurately measured owing to its immense scale or extent

Etymology: Unmeasurableness is a plain formation: the adjective "unmeasurable" with the suffix "-ness" added to turn a quality into a noun. "Unmeasurable" itself is built from "measurable," which comes from "measure," plus the negating prefix "un-." The suffix "-ness" is an old and very productive English device, attached to adjectives across the language's history to name the state or quality they describe, so "unmeasurableness" simply names the condition of being beyond measure. Because the word is a transparent compound of familiar parts, its sense follows directly from them. It describes what is not measurable, especially when the reason is sheer size or extent rather than any lack of tools. A vast ocean or an endless sky has an unmeasurableness that is a property of its scale, and the noun lets writers refer to that property as a thing in itself.

Synonyms: immeasurability, incommensurability, indeterminacy, infinity, vastness

Antonyms: measurability, definiteness, finite, boundedness, determination