Meanings
- uncountableThe quality of being underneath.
While seeing at last beneath the surface of things, he sees that underneathness is not so much a system as a unity. He does glimpse the system: what he sees is the trace of a process, and that process is a system at work.
2000, Richard J. Schneider, Thoreau's sense of place: essays in American environmental writing, page 159 - uncountableA space (literal or figurative) that is underneath.
A house’s underneathness is crushing—weight of sleep pressing from the flats above, little lumps of coal releasing miniature avalanches which rattle down the black pile, furnace grimly dead, asbestos-covered arms prying into every corner.
1944, Emily Carr, “Basement”, in The House of All Sorts1 more example
1973, Edward Wellen, “Chalk Talk,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1973, p. 52, reprinted in The 21st Golden Age of Science Fiction MEGAPACK®: 25 Stories by Edward Weller, Wildside Press, 2015, But below the surface are the reelings and writhings that make the floor of a Freudian jungle a lively place. Dr. Chomsky calls this underneathness, this grimmer grammar, the ‘deep structure.’
Origin
Cite this entry
underneathness. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/underneathness
“underneathness.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/underneathness. Accessed November 3, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “underneathness,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/underneathness.
Source: underneathness on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.