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The Collaborative International Dictionary
Homeliness

Homeliness \Home"li*ness\, n. [From Homely.]

  1. Domesticity; care of home. [Obs.] ``Wifely homeliness.''
    --Chaucer.

  2. Familiarity; intimacy. [Obs.]
    --Chaucer.

  3. Plainness; want of elegance or beauty.

  4. Coarseness; simplicity; want of refinement; as, the homeliness of manners, or language.
    --Addison.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
homeliness

mid-14c., from homely + -ness. Originally "meekness, gentleness," also "familiarity, intimacy; friendliness;" sense degenerated by c.1400 to "want of refinement in manners, coarseness; presumptuousness."

Wiktionary
homeliness

n. 1 The property of being homely. 2 The quality associated with home; domesticity

WordNet
homeliness
  1. n. lacking stylishness or neatness [syn: dowdiness, drabness]

  2. an appearance that is not attractive or beautiful; "fine clothes could not conceal the girl's homeliness" [syn: plainness]

Usage examples of "homeliness".

And he who has been called the father of German painting is thoroughly German, not only in his Saxon honesty, sedateness, and strength, but in the curious mixture of simplicity, subtlety, homeliness, and fantasticalness, which are still found side by side in German genius.

Louis was for Nesta a figure in the rich hues of royal Saintship softened to homeliness by tears.

Ruskin and Morris, Gilbert Scott, Vanbrugh, Inigo Jones and Wren to name but a few had all lent their influence to a building that combined the utility of a water-tower with the homeliness of Wormwood Scrubs.

Scarlett recalled with contempt Melanie’s thin childish figure, her serious heart-shaped face that was plain almost to homeliness.

She suspected that if her father hadn't been in such a hurry to move them out of London he would have waited until something more modern came on the market, but as it was he had bought this pretty half timbered Cheshire farmhouse with its large gardens and its wonderful aspects over the surrounding countryside, and gradually over the years Hazel had put her stamp on it, had brought it to life with all her gentleness and artistic skill, so that people coming into it for the first time caught their breath in pleasure as they studied its colour-washed rooms with their faded chintzes and brocades, its air of homeliness and comfort, its gentle warning welcome to everyone who walked into it.

Their dress, especially that of the younger, amused us by its queer mixture of fashionableness and homeliness, such as grey ribbed stockings and shining paste shoebuckles, rusty velvet small-clothes and a coatee of blue cloth.

Stannis had given her his square jaw and Selyse her Florent ears, and the gods in their cruel wisdom had seen fit to compound her homeliness by afflicting her with greyscale in the cradle.

In the dim space of the choir, partially shut off from the nave of the church by the parish altar and lit only by the constant lamp and the candles on the high altar, the brothers in their stalls showed like carven copies, in this twilight without age or youth, comeliness or homeliness, so many matched shadows.

There was hate in Monk's eyes, complete fury, and Monk's homeliness, twisted by what he was feeling, put across his emotion thoroughly.

The misty low-lying island, still largely covered by the bramble bushes that gave it its name, with the muddy bank of the tidal river on one side and the marshes of the Tyburn brook on the others, presents a bleak mid-winter scene in contrast to the sheltered homeliness of Horstede.