Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The state of being settled, in any sense of the word.

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

  • noun rare The quality or state of being settled; confirmed state.

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

  • noun The quality or state of being settled.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From settled +‎ -ness.

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Examples

  • The place had a settledness to it, something in the collective weight of everything in the room.

    Some Assembly Required Lynn Kiele Bonasia 2008

  • The prosaic settledness of some marriages, the ease of an old priest celebrating the eucharist, the musician's relation to a familiar instrument playing a familiar piece – these belong to the same family of experience as the kind of sanctity that Benedict evokes here; undemonstrative, as Mayr-Harting says, because there is nothing to prove.

    'Shaping Holy Lives', a Conference on Benedictine Spirituality 2003

  • There is something absolutely distinctive about the Tartars and one feels a certain civilization and settledness that is different from all the other villages I have seen.

    Nelka Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch Michael Moukhanoff

  • Tell me rather, with your cruel settledness, what you expect of me, how and in what manner you intend to sacrifice me.

    Chapter V. Book VIII 1917

  • His features were regular, his fairish hair slightly wavy, and in his expression there was a curious and incongruous suggestion of settledness, of acceptance, of satisfaction with life as he met it, which an observer of men would have found difficult to reconcile with his youth and the obvious intelligence of the face.

    Success A Novel Samuel Hopkins Adams 1914

  • I would hesitate to think it could even come in a few thousands, unless they were years of greater settledness and peaceful civilization than our two thousand years of disturbed and warring European Christendom have yet had an example of to show us.

    Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs William Gates 1901

  • He noted in her figure -- in its solidity, its settledness -- the signs of age the beauty doctors were still almost successful in keeping out of that masklike face which was their creation rather than nature's; he noted the rough-looking red of that hair whose thinness was not altogether concealed despite the elaborate care with which it was arranged to give the impression of careless abundance.

    The Second Generation David Graham Phillips 1889

  • Individualist theories for about a century, the Collectivist and Communist theories for about fifty years, acquired a degree of settledness, certitude, apparent permanency, which they never ought to have assumed, for stagnation-this is the word-is the death of progress.

    Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth 2010

  • _settledness_ of nerve and muscle and brain to enable her to bear uninjured the immense strain that the mere living in such a great family necessitates.

    The Education of American Girls Anna Callender Brackett

  • I have seen another of his make, to whom I think this conclusion might more properly be applied; no moderate settledness, still running headlong from one extreme to another, upon occasions not to be guessed at; no line of path without traverse and wonderful contrariety: no one quality simple and unmixed; so that the best guess men can one day make will be, that he affected and studied to make himself known by being not to be known.

    The Essays of Montaigne — Volume 19 Michel de Montaigne 1562

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