different between massiveness vs bigness

English

Etymology

massive +? -ness

Noun

massiveness (usually uncountable, plural massivenesses)

1. The property of being massive.
   • 1896 Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs, Chapter 2,^[1]

     Her height and massiveness in the low room gave her the look of a huge sibyl, while the strange fragrance of the mysterious herb blew in from the little garden.

   • 1914, H. G. Wells, “The Common Sense of Warfare” in An Englishman Looks at the World (U.S. title: Social Forces in England and America), New York: Harper & Brothers, § 2, pp. 163-164,^[2]

     The progress of invention makes both the big ship and the army crowd more and more vulnerable and less effective. A new phase of warfare opens beyond the vista of our current programmes. Smaller, more numerous and various and mobile weapons and craft and contrivances, manned by daring and highly skilled men, must ultimately take the place of those massivenesses.

   • 1920, G. K. Chesterton, The New Jerusalem, Chapter 11,^[3]

     A Norman capital can be heavy because the Norman column is thick, and the whole thing expresses an elephantine massiveness and repose.

   • 1958, Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, London: William Heinemann, Chapter 11,

     There was an oil lamp in all the four huts on Okonkwo's compound, and each hut seen from the others looked like a soft eye of yellow half-light set in the solid massiveness of night.

English

Etymology

From big +? -ness.

Pronunciation

• (UK, US) IPA^(key): /?b??n?s/

Noun

bigness (countable and uncountable, plural bignesses)

1. (now rare) Size. [from 15th c.]
   • 1594, Christopher Marlowe, Edward II, Act II, Scene 1, [1]

     Mine old lord, whiles he liv'd, was so precise,

     That he would take exceptions at my buttons,

     And, being like pins' heads, blame me for the bigness;

     Which made me curate-like in mine attire,

   • 1674, John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book II, lines 1051-3, [2]

     And, fast by, hanging in a golden chain,

     This pendent World, in bigness as a star

     Of smallest magnitude close by the moon.

   • 1704, Isaac Newton, Opticks, London: William Innys, 1730, Book 3, Part I, p. 346, [3]

     Do not several sorts of Rays make Vibrations of several bignesses, which according to their bignesses excite Sensations of several Colours, much after the manner that the Vibrations of the Air, according to their several bignesses excite Sensations of several Sounds?

   • 1726, Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, Part I, Chapter VI, [4]

     […] the tallest horses and oxen are between four and five inches in height, the sheep an inch and half, more or less: their geese about the bigness of a sparrow, and so the several gradations downwards till you come to the smallest, which to my sight, were almost invisible […]
2. The characteristic of being big. [from 15th c.]
   • 1944, Emily Carr, The House of Small, "Art and the House," [6]

     They liked what they liked—would tolerate no innovations. My change in thought and expression had angered them into fierce denouncement. To expose a thing deeper than its skin surface was to them an indecency. They ridiculed my striving for bigness, depth.

Anagrams

• besings, sigbens