Emptiness Meaning

/ˈɛmptinəs/
C1

Definition, CEFR level C1, pronunciation, examples, and quiz.

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nounThe state or feeling of being empty.

nounThe state or feeling of being empty; an emotion that combines hollowness, numbness, disconnection and a lack of meaning in life, resulting in existential boredom, ennui or depression.

An emptiness devours my heart.
There is some comfort in the emptiness of the sea, no past, no future.
Sami tried to fill that emptiness with alcohol.
Synonyms:
Antonyms:
CEFR Practice Quiz
After her departure, he felt a deep ____ in his heart.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
She felt a deep sense of ____ after her best friend moved.

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

"Few people without a training in science can realise the huge isolation of the solar system. The sun with its specks of planets, its dust of planetoids, and its impalpable comets, swims in a vacant immensity that almost defeats the imagination. Beyond the orbit of Neptune there is space, vacant so far as human observation has penetrated, without warmth or light or sound, blank emptiness, for twenty million times a million miles. That is the smallest estimate of the distance to be traversed before the very nearest of the stars is attained." — 1897, H. G. Wells, The Star (Science Fiction):
"It seems that they existed in some sort of previous incarnation of our universe, and use abstract terms to describe their existence, such as "feeding on concepts". They prepared for some sort of ascension, but then the Pattern came, which they describe at first as an all-consuming emptiness, elaborating by saying that anything that passed into it was torn asunder, subjected to a set of principles and order that grinds things down to nothing, in a process of which entropy is just one part." — 2019 January 7, “Exploring the SCP Foundation: Pattern Screamers” (6:12 from the start), in The Exploring Series, archived from the original on 11 Jan 2023:

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CEFR Practice Quiz
After her departure, he felt a deep ____ in his heart.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
She felt a deep sense of ____ after her best friend moved.

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