Talk:pristineness

does this word really exist? I'd like to see a citation--96.51.38.246 05:45, 19 May 2013 (UTC)

By Wiktionary's standards (see WT:CFI), yes- it does. If you search on it in Google books, there are over a thousand hits, of which only three are necessary to verify its existence. One may quibble about whether there's a better substitute (though, off the top of my head, I can't think of one), but it's formed by a regular process of English grammar from a normal word, so I don't think there's a technical reason to consider it wrong. I suspect that the reason you don't find it in other dictionaries is the same reason you don't find most verb forms prefixed by un-: the addition of -ness is so regular that you would have to take up a huge amount of space for completely predictable forms. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:56, 19 May 2013 (UTC)

Good enough, thanks. I was writing a paper and all my sources didn't recognize an adjective to "pristine" including all dictionaries except Wiktionary. It's good to know that it's correct.--96.51.38.246 23:33, 19 May 2013 (UTC)