Busyness

//ˈbɪz.ɪ.nɪs// noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The state of being busy. uncountable

    "She moved back to the table, and her busyness expressed her purpose but also perhaps hid some sort of regret at the news."

  2. 2
    the state of being or appearing to be actively engaged in an activity wordnet

Example

More examples

"She moved back to the table, and her busyness expressed her purpose but also perhaps hid some sort of regret at the news."

Etymology

From busy + -ness; the ⟨y⟩ (-y) is kept to distinguish from business (of which it is a doublet), which is derived from the same two morphemes but by regular spelling rules.

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