Wordlessness

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The quality or state of being unable to express oneself through language or lacking adequate terms to communicate one's thoughts and emotions
2. The condition of lacking the ability to speak or communicate using words
3. Experiencing a state where verbal expression is absent or severely limited

Etymology: Wordlessness is a straightforward formation: the adjective "wordless" with the suffix "-ness" added to turn a quality into a noun. The adjective itself is built from "word" plus "-less," an old English suffix meaning "without," so the whole chain is a compound built from parts that were already in the language. The suffix "-ness" is the more interesting piece. It descends from an Old English noun, "-nes," which was used to turn adjectives into names for states or qualities, and it has been productive in English for over a thousand years. Its ancestry reaches back through Proto-Germanic and into Proto-Indo-European, where it was part of a family of noun-forming endings, but for practical purposes the word is simply English all the way down. Because "-ness" can attach to almost any adjective, English speakers can form a noun like this one on the spot whenever they need to name the condition of being without words. That productivity, rather than any single event in its history, is what explains the word.

Synonyms: silence, mutism, taciturnity, speechlessness, inarticulateness

Antonyms: verbosity, expressiveness, articulation, eloquence, communication