Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The state or character of being grasping; covetousness; rapacity.

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

  • noun the quality of being grasping

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

grasping +‎ -ness

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Examples

  • 'graspingness' alleged to have been shown by the Peclites after the formation of the Government in December 1852, and its modification to satisfy their exigencies, I have felt constrained to address the 'Times.'

    Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. In Two Volumes. Volume II. John Knox Laughton 1872

  • To take all that good-nature, or indulgence, or good opinion confers, shews a want of moderation, and a graspingness that is unworthy of that indulgence; and are bad indications of the use that may be made of the power bequeathed.

    Clarissa Harlowe 2006

  • Back when I started grad school, I belonged to that cohort that referred to our students as "kids" and thrilled to swap stories about their incompetence, their graspingness, their complaints about our authority, and the like.

    A Question of Philosophy: Grad School Theater Heo 2006

  • The unjust man does not always choose the greater, but also the less-in the case of things bad absolutely; but because the lesser evil is itself thought to be in a sense good, and graspingness is directed at the good, therefore he is thought to be grasping.

    The Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle 2002

  • The people who turned the age where they were in authority had been brought up in an atmosphere of graspingness in the '50s.

    The Greatest Ever Bank Robbery: The Collapse of the Savings and Loan Industry 1990

  • It may have been Anna's graspingness, when four years of seniority gave her double my age, or Arthur's genial instinct for destructiveness, which drove me into such deep concealment of my dearest idols.

    An Englishwoman's Love-Letters Anonymous

  • The dash reaching out to her -- reaching to her -- swept into her mind all the graspingness of James which had squeezed the sweetness out of life -- all the hardness which had marked his possession of her.

    The Best Short Stories of 1919 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story Various 1915

  • "Everything or nothing, Monsieur le Cardinal!" was dictated less by the indignation of an Englishman than by the stubborn graspingness of a

    The Countess of Albany Vernon Lee 1895

  • The Italian bishops and barons, less superstitious than the Germans, and with greater reason to resent the domineering graspingness of Gregory, were ready to espouse the Emperor's cause.

    Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series John Addington Symonds 1866

  • Even Buonarroto, who was the best of the brothers and dearest to his heart, hurt him by his graspingness and want of truth.

    The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti John Addington Symonds 1866

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