different between heaviness vs listlessness

English

Etymology

From Middle English hevinesse, from Old English hefi?nes (“heaviness”). Equivalent to heavy +? -ness.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /?h?v?n?s/

Noun

heaviness (countable and uncountable, plural heavinesses)

1. The state of being heavy; weight, weightiness, force of impact or gravity.
2. (archaic) Oppression; dejectedness, sadness; low spirits.
   • 1590, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, II.vii:

     First got with guile, and then preseru'd with dread, / And after spent with pride and lauishnesse, / Leauing behind them griefe and heauinesse.
3. (obsolete) Drowsiness.
   • c. 1610-11, William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act I scene ii^[1]:

     Miranda: The strangeness of your story put / Heaviness in me.

Translations

Anagrams

• evanishes

English

Etymology

From listless +? -ness.

Noun

listlessness (countable and uncountable, plural listlessnesses)

1. The state of being listless; apathetic indifference; lethargy.
   • 1749, John Cleland, Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, Letter the First,^[1]

     But every thing must have an end. A motion made by this angelic youth, in the listlessness of going off sleep, replac'd his shirt and the bed-cloaths in a posture that shut up that treasure from longer view.

   • 1851, Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, Chapter 35,^[2]

     […] lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it.

Translations