Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The state of being apart; aloofness.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The quality of standing apart.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun uncountable The state or quality of being apart.
  • noun countable The result or product of being apart.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

apart +‎ -ness

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word apartness.

Examples

  • Apartheid - literally "apartness" - had been established in 1948 by Afrikaner nationalists with the goal of securing white supremacy and ensuring Afrikaner control of political power.

    SARA - Southeast Asian RSS Aggregator 2009

  • The word (when I use it to describe the SA regime I shall use italics) refers to separation (lit. "apartness") of "races" in South Africa, but assuredly not on a "separate-but-equal" basis.

    Archive 2009-03-01 2009

  • No one ever had a better fix on the Marquis de Sade than Simone de Beauvoir, who called his erotic life "a combination of passionate sexual appetites with a basic emotional 'apartness'."

    A Divided Nature 2008

  • There is a desire to bring an end to the charges and countercharges, the guilt and shame, the sense of racial "apartness," and to move toward a world in which people are judged by their personal journeys rather than by the past of the group of which they are members -- by birth and pigmentation.

    Amitai Etzioni: Race in the Obama Age 2008

  • OKE: Apartheid, literally "apartness" in Afrikaans and Dutch, was in basic terms racism made law.

    CNN Transcript Dec 16, 2006 2006

  • Does the “chosenness” of the Jews, granted by the acceptance of God’s Torah, entail an apartness, an eternal special-case condition?

    The Lampshade Mark Jacobson 2010

  • By contrast, Orthodox Jews reinforce their identity by adhering to distinctive dietary and living codes; they see the enforced "apartness" from popular culture as a continuing sign of their Judaism.

    LSU Tigers Central 2009

  • Apartheid does literally mean "apartness" in Afrikaans, and its creators and implementors in the old South Africa instituted it because they believed the non-white population of that country was intrinsically inferior on the individual and collective levels - and they furthermore believed in a theological imperative for that separation.

    Joshua Treviño: obiter dictum. 2009

  • Derived from the Afrikaans word for "apartness," apartheid is a term that came into usage in the 1930s and signified the political policy under which the races in South Africa were subject to "separate development."

    My Right Word 2008

  • It went without saying that Jewish holy apartness was not only chauvinistic and exclusivist but also un-American.

    Rabbi Sid Schwarz: The Necessity of Jewish Values in the Contemporary World Rabbi Sid Schwarz 2010

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.