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say it: DUHL-nuhs
dullness is a noun meaning "the quality of being slow to understand". It is pronounced /ˈdʌlnəs/ — DUHL-nuhs. It carries 5 recorded senses.
the quality of being slow to understand
the quality of lacking interestingness
“the stories were of a dullness to bring a buffalo to its knees”
a lack of visual brightness
“the brightness of the orange sky was reflected in the dullness of the orange sea”
lack of sensibility
“there was a dullness in his heart”
“without him the dullness of her life crept into her work no matter how she tried to compartmentalize it.”
without sharpness or clearness of edge or point
“the dullness of the pencil made his writing illegible”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for dullness come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.