Aboutness

//əˈbaʊt.nəs//

"Aboutness" in a Sentence (2 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.

Movie critics provide a good example of aboutness judgments. When some critics rave and others pan, it is not because they have seen different physical texts; rather, all the technical knowledge, topical knowledge, emotions and beliefs of each critic are being engaged in the construction of a response to the physical text.

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