different between listlessness vs unlust

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

English

Etymology

From Middle English unlust, from Old English unlust (“displeasure, dislike”), from Proto-West Germanic *unlust, from Proto-Germanic *unlustuz (“listlessness”). Equivalent to un- +? lust.

Noun

unlust (countable and uncountable, plural unlusts)

1. (rare) Displeasure; dislike.
   • 1983, Alison Waley, A Half of Two Lives:

     Poetry for me wove its own spell to secure me against all 'unlusts' - all criticisms - even against joylessness: I was set apart; in safety; as secure - in this way - as he. Who was in that audience, I wonder now? That all was success is certain.

2. (obsolete) listlessness; disinclination.

   • He doth all thing with annoye, and with wrawnesse, slaknesse, and excusation, with idlenesse and unlust.

Old English

Etymology

From Proto-Germanic *unlustuz. Equivalent to un- +? lust. Cognate with Gothic ???????????????????????????????? (unlustus, “apathy, listlessness”) and German Unlust (“lack of desire, aversion”).

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /?un?lust/

Noun

unlust m

1. absence of desire; disgust, disinclination, listlessness
2. want of pleasure; joylessness, weariness
3. evil pleasure, lust

Declension

Descendants

• Middle English: unlust
  • English: unlust

Derived terms

• unlustian

References

• Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller (1898) , “unlust”, in An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, 2nd edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press.