Vagueness

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The quality of being unclear, imprecise, or lacking in definite form or expression
2. The state of being indistinct or lacking clarity, often resulting in ambiguity or a failure to provide precise information
3. The characteristic of having an unclear or uncertain meaning, which leads to potential misunderstanding or insufficient detail

Etymology: Vagueness is about as transparent as English compounds get: the adjective "vague" with the suffix "-ness" attached to turn a quality into a noun. The more interesting history is in the suffix. "-ness" descends from an Old English noun "-nes" that meant "state, quality, or condition," and it is one of the oldest productive noun-forming endings in the language. Its ancestry runs back through Proto-Germanic forms, but in practice English has been adding it to native and borrowed adjectives for over a thousand years, which is why it can be attached to almost anything. The adjective "vague" is the more borrowed part of the story. It came into English from Old French "vague," which in turn came from Latin "vagus," meaning "wandering" or "roaming." The original sense was physical, a thing that drifts without a fixed course, and the meaning gradually shifted toward the idea of something that wanders without a fixed boundary, becoming indistinct. Adding "-ness" to that sense gave English a single word for the state of being unclear.

Synonyms: ambiguity, indistinctness, obscurity

Antonyms: clarity, explicitness