wrongness

plural wrongnesses

1. uncountableusuallyThe quality of being wrong; error or fault.

   It’s not true that I’m always thinking of H. Work and conversation make that impossible. But the times when I’m not are perhaps my worst. For then, though I have forgotten the reason, there is spread over everything a vague sense of wrongness, of something amiss.

   1961, C. S. Lewis, chapter 3, in A Grief Observed, London: Faber & Faber, published 1964, page 30

   1 more example

   Often, on the plantation, he had seen the white men take drinks. But there was something somehow different in the manner of Borckman’s taking a drink. Jerry was aware, vaguely, that there was something surreptitious about it. What was wrong he did not know, yet he sensed the wrongness and watched suspiciously.

   1917 April, Jack London, chapter IV, in Jerry of the Islands, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company, →OCLC, page 47

   Synonyms: wrength

2. uncountableusuallyWrong or reprehensible things or actions.

   1937, Elizabeth Sparks, Interview transcribed in Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves, Washington: Library of Congress, 1941, Volume 17, Virginia Narratives, Old Massa done so much wrongness I couldn’t tell yer all of it.

   1 more example

   But your father didnt exactly do wrong things: he said them and thought them: that was what was so dreadful. He really had a sort of religion of wrongness. Just as one doesnt mind men practising immorality so long as they own that they are in the wrong by preaching morality; so I couldnt forgive Andrew for preaching immorality while he practised morality.

   1905, [George] Bernard Shaw, “Major Barbara”, in John Bull’s Other Island and Major Barbara: Also How He Lied to Her Husband, London: Archibald Constable & Co., published 1907, →OCLC, Act I, page 197