emptiness

See also: Emptiness

English

Alternative forms

• emptinesse (obsolete)

Etymology

Inherited from Middle English emptynesse, from Old English ǣmtiġnes. By surface analysis, empty +‎ -ness.

Pronunciation

• Audio (US):

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Noun

emptiness (countable and uncountable, plural emptinesses)

1. The state or feeling of being empty; an emotion that combines hollowness, numbness, disconnection and a lack of meaning in life, resulting in existential boredom, ennui or depression.
2. A void; a nothingness; something lacking existence.
   • 1897, H. G. Wells, The Star‎^[1] (Science Fiction):

     Few people without a training in science can realise the huge isolation of the solar system. The sun with its specks of planets, its dust of planetoids, and its impalpable comets, swims in a vacant immensity that almost defeats the imagination. Beyond the orbit of Neptune there is space, vacant so far as human observation has penetrated, without warmth or light or sound, blank emptiness, for twenty million times a million miles. That is the smallest estimate of the distance to be traversed before the very nearest of the stars is attained.

   • 2019 January 7, “Exploring the SCP Foundation: Pattern Screamers” (6:12 from the start), in The Exploring Series‎^[2], archived from the original on 11 January 2023:

     It seems that they existed in some sort of previous incarnation of our universe, and use abstract terms to describe their existence, such as "feeding on concepts". They prepared for some sort of ascension, but then the Pattern came, which they describe at first as an all-consuming emptiness, elaborating by saying that anything that passed into it was torn asunder, subjected to a set of principles and order that grinds things down to nothing, in a process of which entropy is just one part.

3. A nonexistence; a lack of existence.

Derived terms

• nonemptiness

Translations

the state or feeling of being empty — see also vacuum,‎ void,‎ vacuousness

Albanian: boshllëk (sq) m Azerbaijani: boşluq (az) Bulgarian: празнота (bg) f (praznota) Catalan: buidor f, buidesa f Chinese: Mandarin: 空虛 / 空虚 (zh) (kōngxū), 空洞 (zh) (kōngdòng) Czech: prázdnota f Danish: tomhed Dutch: leegte (nl) f Finnish: tyhjyys (fi) French: vide (fr) m, néant (fr) m, vacuité (fr) f Galician: baleiro (gl) m German: Leere (de) f, Leerheit f Greek: κενότητα (el) f (kenótita) Ancient Greek: κενότης f (kenótēs) Hebrew: רֵיקָנוּת f (reikanút) Hindi: रिक्तता (hi) f (riktatā), शून्यता (hi) f (śūnyatā) Hungarian: üresség (hu) Irish: foilmhe f Japanese: 空虚 (ja) (くうきょ, kūkyo), 空 (ja) (から, kara), 虚しさ (munashisa), 空っぽ (ja) (karappo) Kurdish: Central Kurdish: چۆڵیی (çollîy) Northern Kurdish: valahî (ku) f Māori: tīaretanga Norwegian: tomhet Plautdietsch: Ladichkjeit f Polish: pustka (pl) f Portuguese: vazio (pt) m Russian: пустота́ (ru) f (pustotá) Spanish: vaciedad (es) f Swedish: tomhet (sv) c Ukrainian: порожне́ча f (porožnéča)

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Translations to be checked

French: (please verify) néant (fr)

Anagrams

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