Loneliness is the ache of having nobody to talk to. The television left on for company, a Sunday afternoon with the phone not ringing, a table for one in a loud restaurant.
It is uncountable: no 'a loneliness', no plural. The distinction that matters is between being alone and being lonely — you can spend a happy week alone in a cabin, and you can feel a wave of loneliness at a party full of people. Solitude is the word for the good version; loneliness is the version nobody chooses. It also describes places rather than people: the loneliness of a moor in winter, of a petrol station at three in the morning, where it means an emptiness that gets into you. Doctors write about it as a health problem now, which is why newspapers run headlines about an epidemic of loneliness.
1nounlonelinessThe unhappy feeling of being without company.
“The loneliness hit hardest in the evenings.”
synonyms: isolation
2nounemptyThe empty, remote quality of a place.
“He wrote about the loneliness of the high moors.”
loneliness is a feeling.
Loneliness is built the ordinary English way: lonely plus -ness, the ending that turns a quality into a thing, as in kindness and darkness. The adjective came first, and the name for the feeling was assembled afterwards.
From lonely + ness.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA