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emptiness

nounB2Common in everyday speech and writing · #6,244 of 15,258neutral

Emptiness is the state of containing nothing. The emptiness of the room, a sense of emptiness, stare into the emptiness.

The emotional sense is the commoner one and it names a real symptom — a persistent feeling of emptiness is one of the things doctors ask about. In Buddhist philosophy emptiness is a technical term about the absence of fixed essence, not about nothing existing.

Temerarius · CC BY-SA 4.0

Definitions of emptiness

  1. 1nounemptinessThe state of containing nothing.B2

    “The emptiness of the house struck her when the last of the furniture was carried away.”

emptiness is a state.

Where it comes from

Old English aemtignes comes from aemtig, empty, which meant unoccupied or at leisure. The word had nothing to do with containers at first.

  1. Old English

    ǣmtiġnes

  2. Middle English

    emptynesse

  3. English, today

    emptiness

Middle English emptynesse, from Old English ǣmtiġnes. by surface analysis, empty + -ness.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

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emptiness in the wild

  • "emptiness", "voidness", "vacuity") is an Indian philosophical concept in Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, and other Indian philosophical traditions.

    Śūnyatā

  • In Mahayana Buddhism, he is considered foremost in understanding emptiness.

    Subhūti

  • Unlike ordinary pride, divine pride is grounded in compassion and the understanding of emptiness.

    Deity yoga

  • Shentong (Wylie: gzhan stong, "emptiness of other") refers to a range of views held by different Tibetan Buddhist figures.

    Rangtong and shentong

  • There was no refuge now from spiritual emptiness and discontent, and Dorothea had to bear her bad mood, as she would have borne a headache.

    Middlemarch· George Eliot

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

From Project Gutenberg, public domain. These sentences are from real books, shown to illustrate the word at work.

Related words

  • empty