seventeenness

English

Etymology

seventeen +‎ -ness

Noun

seventeenness (uncountable)

1. (rare) The property of being seventeen.
   • 1921, Fannie Hurst, Stardust: The Story of an American Girl:

     It was the first time in all the largesse of her youth that such a tone had assailed Zoe. The very seventeenness of her revolted; she dropped her attitude.

   • 1999, Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope:

     None of these descriptions seems to give you a clue to the intrinsic seventeenness of 17 – the unique feature which makes it the very number that it is.

   • 2013, Shannon Bischoff, Carmen Jany, Functional Approaches to Language, page 126:

     Might not some language somewhere offer a seventeenness category that would create immediate recognition of that many items? Such a category seems unlikely, of course, and we might see it as excluded by capacity limitations on focal consciousness, limitations that would be far exceeded by a display of seventeen items.