Clerkliness
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 scholarship (character or qualities of a scholar) archaic, uncountable
"And yet here in this Sermon of Jonah is no great curiousness, not great clerkliness, no great affectation of words, nor painted eloquence; it was none other but, "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be destroyed;" it was no more."
- 2 The character or qualities of a clerk; the quality of being clerkish; orderliness, attention to detail, diligence, and/or a focus on bureaucratic tasks or recordkeeping. uncountable
"The letter found in the hut is also somewhat different, for while at the Encantadas he was informed that, not only did it evince a certain clerkliness, but was full of the strangest satiric effrontery which does not adequately appear in Porter's version."
Example
More examples"And yet here in this Sermon of Jonah is no great curiousness, not great clerkliness, no great affectation of words, nor painted eloquence; it was none other but, "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be destroyed;" it was no more."
Etymology
From clerkly + -ness.
More for "clerkliness"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.