lankness

plural lanknesses

1. countableuncountableThe property of being lank, slender or thin.

   The boy's lankness reflected his malnutrition.

   3 more examples

   The gravity of his dress, together with a certain lankness of cheek and stiffness of deportment, added nearly ten years to his age, but his figure was that of one not yet past thirty.

   1841 February–November, Charles Dickens, “Barnaby Rudge. Chapter 35.”, in Master Humphrey’s Clock, volume III, London: Chapman & Hall, […], →OCLC

   Phryne going to the Bath as Venus.— […] Was ever such a heap of rag dolls ever brought together and called men and women. Venuses indeed!—say rather limp-lanknesses seen through a burnt-sienna fog in a classical dream after falling asleep over one of Racine’s tragedies.

   1856 November 15, “Turner’s Pictures at Marlborough House”, in The Athenæum, number 1516, page 1407

   When he turned inquiringly toward them they saw that he was stoop-shouldered; though not from any deformity, but from sheer, slouching lankness.

   1914, B. M. Bower, chapter 8, in Flying U Ranch

2. countableuncountableThe property of being lank: straight, flat and limp. (of hair)

   1 more example

   Linen, from what œconomy I know not, is seldom allowed in those portraits, even to the ladies, who lean carelesly on a bank, and play with a parrot they do not look at, under a tranquillity which ill accords with their seeming situation, the slightness of their vestment and the lankness of their hair having the appearance of their being just risen from the bath, and of having found none of their cloaths to put on, but a loose gown.

   1771, Horace Walpole, chapter 1, in Anecdotes of Painting in England, volume 4, page 2