- 1
Womanliness is the quality of behaving, dressing, or looking in the way people traditionally think suits a grown woman — gentle, warm, , caring, quietly strong. It is the noun form of , so you use it when you want to name the quality itself rather than describe a person: "her quiet womanliness", "there was a warmth and womanliness about her". It is meant as praise, but it is praise of an old-fashioned kind, because it praises a woman for matching a picture that society drew long ago. For that reason many people today find it uncomfortable, and a writer who uses it usually knows they are choosing a warm, gentle, slightly dated word. It is formal and literary; you will read it far more often than you will hear it. One more thing worth noticing: and womanliness are about being a grown woman, an adult, as opposed to a girl. So the word often carries a sense of maturity and calm, not just softness.
女人味、女性特質(傳統上認為女性該有的溫柔優雅氣質)
組成womanly + -ness. The suffix -ness turns an adjective into a noun for the quality: kind → kindness, dark → darkness, womanly → womanliness. Note the spelling change: the -y of womanly becomes -i- before -ness.
原始詞典資料1 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法,原文照列,我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的;有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
womanlinessnoun/ˈwʊmənlɪnəs/
- 1
The condition of being a woman; femininity.
- As she walked along to-day, for all her bouncing handsome womanliness, you could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then.
資料來源:英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary(CC BY-SA 4.0)。 原文照列,未經改寫。