faintness

plural faintnesses

1. countableuncountableThe property of being or feeling faint.

   The humming sound and the unvarying white light induced a sort of faintness, an empty feeling inside his head.

   1949 June 8, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter 3, in Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel, London: Secker & Warburg, →OCLC; republished [Australia]: Project Gutenberg of Australia, August 2001, part 1, page 1

   3 more examples

   And he first took exceptions at this badge, / Pronouncing that the paleness of this flower / Bewray'd the faintness of my master's heart.

   1591 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The First Part of Henry the Sixt”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act IV, scene i]

   The confusion, in which impressions are sometimes involved, proceeds only from their faintness and unsteadiness, not from any capacity in the mind to receive any impression, which in its real existence has no particular degree nor proportion.

   1738, David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Section 7

   The faintness of the voice was pitiable and dreadful. It was not the faintness of physical weakness, though confinement and hard fare no doubt had their part in it. Its deplorable peculiarity was, that it was the faintness of solitude and disuse. It was like the last feeble echo of a sound made long and long ago.

   1859, Charles Dickens, chapter 6, in A Tale of Two Cities

   Synonyms: faintheartedness, dimness