Aboutness

//əˈbaʊt.nəs// noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The relevance of a text to its reader. countable, uncountable

    "The experience of attending to how a good film works is a matter of understanding the composition and the inexhaustible flow of "aboutnesses," relevancies to the world that emerge from the interaction of qualities of meaningfulness that attend such a web of forms and connotations, such a design."

Example

More examples

"The experience of attending to how a good film works is a matter of understanding the composition and the inexhaustible flow of "aboutnesses," relevancies to the world that emerge from the interaction of qualities of meaningfulness that attend such a web of forms and connotations, such a design."

Etymology

From about + -ness.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.