separateness

English

Etymology

From separate +‎ -ness.

Noun

separateness (usually uncountable, plural separatenesses)

1. The property of being separate.
   • 1964 October 11, Jean Stafford, “Breaking Out Of Isolation”, in The New York Times‎^[1]:

     In “The Liberation,” a 30‐yearold^[sic] college teacher breaks out of the psychic loneliness of a smothering family into the redeeming sense of her separateness; she had been kept from the person she really was.

   • 2008 November 14, Gregory Beyer, “Isolation Is Pretty Splendid”, in The New York Times‎^[2]:

     A prideful sense of separateness prevails toward what Mrs. Moskowitz called “frenetic” Manhattan and “the hipper parts of Brooklyn.”

   • 2020 November 7, David W. Blight, “Confronting the Damage of Trumpism”, in The New York Times‎^[3]:

     Professor Marty saw Americans retreating into “separatenesses” by choice, and he worried, with Reinhold Niebuhr, that “the chief source of man’s inhumanity to man seems to be the tribal limits of his sense of obligation to the other man.”