Meanings
- rareuncountableSomething which is undergoing rot or decomposition.
He sent women down to the beach to collect the guttings and debris left there, the rottingness of fish which stank so badly, the unsaltable entrails of cod and plaice and porpoise in wooden buckets.
1992, Helen Flint, Making the angels weep, Heinemann, page 252 more examples
[…]I felt as though I could never get away from death and...and rottingness, and I wouldn't talk to him any more. I couldn't.' 'I'm not surprised,' said Willow gently. 'But because I wouldn't talk, Andrew started to come home later and later every day, and then afterwards I found out where he'd been.'
2016 February 1, Natasha Cooper, Sour Grapes: A Willow King Novel 7, Macmillan, page 93In such an enclosing autism the knowledge that God suffers one's agony can be a delivering knowledge indeed: One is not at all a vessel of rottingness; one is a real, living, feeling consciousness, even in the extreme experience of suffering - […]
2018 February 19, Aharon R. E. Agus, Hermeneutic Biography in Rabbinic Midrash: The Body of this Death and Life, Walter de Gruyter, page 222
Origin
- Middle Englishrotyngnesse
- Englishrottingness
From Middle English rotyngnesse; equivalent to rotting + -ness.
More words from Middle English
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
rottingness. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/rottingness
“rottingness.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/rottingness. Accessed November 3, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “rottingness,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/rottingness.
Source: rottingness on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.