mutedness

English

Etymology

From muted +‎ -ness.

Noun

mutedness (uncountable)

1. The state or quality of being muted.
   • 1967, Juan Ventura Agudiez, The Afternoons of Thérèze Lamarck, page 43:

     I fix on a street near a cemetery, beside an avenue of trees, and that street contains in its secret, the only key to those late afternoons, the surprise of Théreze Lamarck in the city, when upon arriving from Lescar she converts, rapidly, the meadows of the castle into pavements symmetrical, spoliated of all epoch, and in the mutedness of their footsteps there converge horsemen with weighty helmets and covered faces...

   • 2001, Elizabeth Rapley, A Social History of the Cloister: Daily Life in the Teaching Monasteries of the Old Regime, page 258:

     It is also about the mutedness of the monasteries' awareness of the wider society of the Old Regime.

   • 2013, Shalini Puri, The Legacies of Caribbean Radical Politics, page xvi:

     Girvan also addresses the reasons for the mutedness of mass-opposition to the EPA in the Anglophone Caribbean as compared with earlier anti-globalization agitations in Latin America.

Anagrams

• must needs, needs must