Definitions

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

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

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From inner +‎ -ness.

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Examples

  • On one side, what you call "innerness" and "richness of sound" are the result, I think, of having grown up fairly isolated within the silence of my own head — hearing myself think, especially at night when I'd talk myself to sleep.

    Language Makes the Senses One 2003

  • On one side, what you call "innerness" and "richness of sound" are the result, I think, of having grown up fairly isolated within the silence of my own head — hearing myself think, especially at night when I'd talk myself to sleep.

    Language Makes the Senses One 2003

  • Rebecca "brings the vitality of herself -- her offhand sense of her own consequence"; Mizzy "feels like a fantasy he's having, his own dream of self, made manifest to others"; Peter exhibits an artist whose video installations show ordinary citizens in repeated commonplace actions, but these figures "do, of course, each of them, carry within them a jewel of self, not just the wounds and the hopes but an innerness."

    Alan Hollinghurst On Michael Cunningham Sammy Perlmutter 2010

  • Rebecca "brings the vitality of herself -- her offhand sense of her own consequence"; Mizzy "feels like a fantasy he's having, his own dream of self, made manifest to others"; Peter exhibits an artist whose video installations show ordinary citizens in repeated commonplace actions, but these figures "do, of course, each of them, carry within them a jewel of self, not just the wounds and the hopes but an innerness."

    Alan Hollinghurst On Michael Cunningham: The New York Review Of Books The Huffington Post News Team 2010

  • Identity or innerness conceived as 'fire' exceeds and disturbs the notion of

    Psychology in Search of Psyches: Friedrich Schelling, Gotthilf Schubert and the Obscurities of the Romantic Soul 2008

  • Elliptical or not, "The aircraft rotates" denies the reader clear purchase for innerness; the declarative rhetoric of the poem creates a carapace of attitude.

    Poetry: What Does It Accomplish? 2010

  • Rebecca "brings the vitality of herself--her offhand sense of her own consequence"; Mizzy "feels like a fantasy he's having, his own dream of self, made manifest to others"; Peter exhibits an artist whose video installations show ordinary citizens in repeated commonplace actions, but these figures "do, of course, each of them, carry within them a jewel of self, not just the wounds and the hopes but an innerness."

    Alan Hollinghurst On Michael Cunningham: The New York Review Of Books The Huffington Post News Team 2010

  • Kaufman succeeds in endowing these shadowy “wives” with an innerness which the Bible does not provide.

    Shirley Kaufman. 2009

  • Complementing this negative case against the claims of traditional political-military history to be of overriding importance, Herder also has positive reasons for focusing instead on the “innerness” of human life in history.

    Johann Gottfried von Herder Forster, Michael 2007

  • It should also be noted that Skinner's derisive attitude towards explanatory references to mental innerness stems, in part, not just from fears of explanatory regression but from his conviction that if the language of psychology is permitted to refer to internal processing, this goes some way towards permitting talk of immaterial mental substances, agents endowed with contra-causal free will, and little persons (homunculi) within bodies.

    Behaviorism Graham, George 2007

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