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fairness

nounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈfɛə.nəs//
  • United States//ˈfɛɚ.nəs//
  • Australia//ˈfeː.nəs//
  • New Zealand//ˈfeə.nəs//
  • //ˈfiə.nəs//

The property of being fair or equitable.

noun

  1. 1

    The property of being fair or equitable.

    Some questioned the fairness of the new laws.

    The reason why fairness in taxation matters is institutionalized unfairness rots society from the inside, and the social order and economy eventually collapse.

  2. 2

    archaicThe property of being fair or beautiful.

Etymology

From Middle English fairness, fæȝernesse, from Old English fæġernes (“fairness; beauty; pleasantness”), equivalent to fair + -ness. Cognate with Old High German fagarnessi (“fairness”).

Forms

plural
fairnesses
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).