Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun The state or quality of being low, in any sense of the word.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun The state or quality of being low.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun The property of being
low .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a low or small degree of any quality (amount or force or temperature etc.)
- noun a position of inferior status; low in station or rank or fortune or estimation
- noun a feeling of low spirits
- noun the quality of being low; lacking height
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Literally, "But it shall hail with coming down of the forest, and in lowness shall the city (Nineveh) be brought low; that is, humbled."
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He pursued Fielding henceforth with steady depreciation, caught eagerly at any scandal respecting him, professed himself unable to perceive his genius, deplored his "lowness," and comforted himself by reflecting that, if he pleased at all, it was because he had learned the art from _Pamela_.
Fielding Austin Dobson 1880
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Smollett felt the censures on his brutality and "lowness," and he promises to seek "that goal of perfection where nature is castigated almost even to still life ... where decency, divested of all substance, hovers about like a fantastic shadow."
Adventures Among Books Andrew Lang 1878
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In the Western States of America, where produce is very cheap, labour very dear, the "lowness" of the farming is always abused by the
Speculations from Political Economy C. B. Clarke 1869
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Make what deduction the too scrupulous reader of _Oliver_ might please for "lowness" in the subject, the precision and the unexaggerated force of the delineation were not to be disputed.
The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete John Forster 1844
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[(Mary) 29.3 (, in spite of a kind of lowness of spirits, which she endeavoured to persuade)] TJ
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Mary, in spite of a kind of lowness of spirits, which she endeavoured to persuade herself proceeded only from the indifference she felt about going to this chit-chat dinner, yet never was longer in dressing, nor ever took more pains with her person; she drew the little straggling ringlet over the temple, displayed the well-turned arm through a sleeve of cobweb thinness, and
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I do not quote his words to draw attention to a battle that is still being fought, but to explain my own object in working, as I have worked ever since that evidence was given, to make a part of Irish literature accessible to many, especially among my young countrymen, who have not opportunity to read the translations of the chief scholars, scattered here and there in learned periodicals, or patience and time to disentangle overlapping and contradictory versions, that they may judge for themselves as to its "lowness" and "want of imagination," and the other well-known charges brought against it before the same Commission.
Gods and Fighting Men Lady Gregory 1892
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“Sometimes what is impressive is a sheer lowness of standards, a state of contentment with those modes of living which civilized people, as much by metaphor as by knowledge, surely, call primitive.”
A Renegade History of the United States Thaddeus Russell 2010
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The lowness of the buildings in Dublin, shops that were cheap imitations of larger and better stores in bigger cities, ways of dressing that were either shabby or pretentious, and ways of moving in the street that lacked alertness or any style, all began to irritate her.
The Empty Family Colm Tóibín 2011
qroqqa commented on the word lowness
Owing to the local Russian custom of calling each person sometimes by all of his names, sometimes by only his first three or four, and sometimes by a nickname which has nothing to do with any of the other names, it is difficult for one with my congenital lowness of brow to gather exactly whom they are talking about.
—Dorothy Parker, review of Tolstoy's Redemption, in Vanity Fair, Dec. 1918
November 12, 2008