WILFULNESS

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

 Dictionary entry overview: What does wilfulness mean? 

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

1. the trait of being prone to disobedience and lack of discipline

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

 Dictionary entry details 

• WILFULNESS (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

The trait of being prone to disobedience and lack of discipline

Classified under:

Nouns denoting attributes of people and objects

Synonyms:

fractiousness; unruliness; wilfulness; willfulness

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

intractability; intractableness (the trait of being hard to influence or control)

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

contrariness; perverseness; perversity (deliberate and stubborn unruliness and resistance to guidance or discipline)

wildness (an unruly disposition to do as one pleases)

Derivation:

wilful (habitually disposed to disobedience and opposition)

 Context examples 

I lamented my own folly and wilfulness, in attempting a second voyage, against the advice of all my friends and relations.

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

This attack of his on the established had seemed to her just so much wilfulness of opinion.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

I had thought you peculiarly free from wilfulness of temper, self-conceit, and every tendency to that independence of spirit which prevails so much in modern days, even in young women, and which in young women is offensive and disgusting beyond all common offence.

(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)

I saw her, a most beautiful little creature, with the cloudless blue eyes, that had looked into my childish heart, turned laughingly upon another child of Minnie's who was playing near her; with enough of wilfulness in her bright face to justify what I had heard; with much of the old capricious coyness lurking in it; but with nothing in her pretty looks, I am sure, but what was meant for goodness and for happiness, and what was on a good and happy course.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)