Meanings
- uncountableThe quality of not being utterly predictable; the specificity that characterizes an occurrence as meaningful.
The experience of “eventness” has to do with the element of suspense.
2016, Richard Beach, Deborah Appleman, Bob Fecho, Teaching Literature to Adolescents, page 2093 more examples
When the present simply actualizes what had to happen, events lack eventness.
1994, Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time, page 22Still, certain programmatic commitments [of avant-garde art] can be identified: championing the volatile eventness of corporeal performances, foregrounding themes, materials, and actions derived from any place or period save that of established art world, […]
2013, Isher-Paul Sahni, “More than Horseplay”, in Studies in Popular Culture, volume 35, page 74But to extricate a thought, utterance, or deed from the contingency and particularity of its occurrence is precisely to transcribe away its eventness, that is to say, its living, unpredetermined quality, its concrete situatedness in time and place, and the particularized meaning attendant on this unsystematizable, uncodifiable specificity.
2014, John Nguyet Erni, Cultural Studies of Rights: Critical Articulations, page 34
Origin
Coined by Mikhail Bakhtin as event + -ness.
Full word history & related roots →Rhymes & wordplay
Anagrams
Cite this entry
eventness. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/eventness
“eventness.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/eventness. Accessed November 3, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “eventness,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/eventness.
Source: eventness on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.