VICIOUSNESS

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does viciousness mean? 

• VICIOUSNESS (noun)
  The noun VICIOUSNESS has 1 sense:

1. the trait of extreme cruelty

  Familiarity information: VICIOUSNESS used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• VICIOUSNESS (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

The trait of extreme cruelty

Classified under:

Nouns denoting attributes of people and objects

Synonyms:

brutality; ferociousness; savagery; viciousness

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

cruelness; cruelty; harshness (the quality of being cruel and causing tension or annoyance)

Derivation:

vicious (marked by deep ill will; deliberately harmful)

vicious ((of persons or their actions) able or disposed to inflict pain or suffering)

vicious (having the nature of vice)

 Context examples 

But I must say I had never received a letter of such viciousness before.

(Health threats caused by mobile phone radiation, EUROPARL TV)

Well, he has rather more viciousness than I gave him credit for, has Master Joseph.

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

Even the Jacks aboard our ships fought with a viciousness against a French vessel which they would never show to Dane, Dutchman, or Spaniard.

(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

White Fang, near the corner of the cabin and forty feet away, was snarling with blood-curdling viciousness, not at Scott, but at the dog- musher.

(White Fang, by Jack London)

And again, with never-failing wonder, I remarked the total lack of viciousness, or wickedness, or sinfulness in his face.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

When he left the car, he strode along the sidewalk as a wrathful man will stride, and he rang the Morse bell with such viciousness that it roused him to consciousness of his condition, so that he entered in good nature, smiling with amusement at himself.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

It would appear that they are a half-brute, half-human species, a race apart, wherein there is no such thing as sex; that they are hatched out by the sun like turtle eggs, or receive life in some similar and sordid fashion; and that all their days they fester in brutality and viciousness, and in the end die as unlovely as they have lived.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

To see moral grandeur rising out of cesspools of iniquity; to rise himself and first glimpse beauty, faint and far, through mud-dripping eyes; to see out of weakness, and frailty, and viciousness, and all abysmal brutishness, arising strength, and truth, and high spiritual endowment—

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)