FONDNESS

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does fondness mean? 

• FONDNESS (noun)
  The noun FONDNESS has 3 senses:

1. a predisposition to like something

2. a positive feeling of liking

3. a quality proceeding from feelings of affection or love

  Familiarity information: FONDNESS used as a noun is uncommon.

 Dictionary entry details 

• FONDNESS (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A predisposition to like something

Classified under:

Nouns denoting feelings and emotions

Synonyms:

fancy; fondness; partiality

Context example:

she had dismissed him quite brutally, relegating him to the status of a passing fancy, or less

Hypernyms ("fondness" is a kind of...):

liking (a feeling of pleasure and enjoyment)

Derivation:

fond ((followed by 'of' or 'to') having a strong preference or liking for)

Sense 2

Meaning:

A positive feeling of liking

Classified under:

Nouns denoting feelings and emotions

Synonyms:

affection; affectionateness; fondness; heart; philia; tenderness; warmheartedness; warmness

Context example:

the warmness of his welcome made us feel right at home

Hypernyms ("fondness" is a kind of...):

feeling (the experiencing of affective and emotional states)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "fondness"):

attachment; fond regard (a feeling of affection for a person or an institution)

protectiveness (a feeling of protective affection)

regard; respect (a feeling of friendship and esteem)

soft spot (a sentimental affection)

Derivation:

fond (having or displaying warmth or affection)

Sense 3

Meaning:

A quality proceeding from feelings of affection or love

Classified under:

Nouns denoting attributes of people and objects

Synonyms:

affectionateness; fondness; lovingness; warmth

Hypernyms ("fondness" is a kind of...):

emotionalism; emotionality (emotional nature or quality)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "fondness"):

tenderness (a tendency to express warm and affectionate feeling)

uxoriousness (foolish fondness for or excessive submissiveness to one's wife)

Derivation:

fond (extravagantly or foolishly loving and indulgent)

 Context examples 

She treated her therefore, with all the indulgent fondness of a parent towards a favourite child on the last day of its holidays.

(Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen)

The blind fondness which was for ever producing evil around her she had never known.

(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)

It was very pale; and bore the traces of deeper emotion than my letter alone, weakened by the doubts her fondness would have raised upon it, would have been likely to create.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

At first she had tolerated with sisterly fondness what she conceived to be his foolishness; but now, out of sisterly solicitude, she grew anxious.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

A feeling of fondness for a person or thing.

(Like, NCI Thesaurus)

He has no indulgence for me—no fondness.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

I thought of the assistant’s fondness for photography, and his trick of vanishing into the cellar.

(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

They have no fondness for their colts or foals, but the care they take in educating them proceeds entirely from the dictates of reason.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

What agonising fondness did I feel for them!

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

Harriet seemed ready to worship her friend for a sentence so satisfactory; and Emma was only saved from raptures and fondness, which at that moment would have been dreadful penance, by the sound of her father's footsteps.

(Emma, by Jane Austen)