perverseness

1. 1.

   deliberate and stubborn unruliness and resistance to guidance or discipline

   Synonymscontrarinessperversity

   Broaderunruliness

   Narrowercussedness
2. 2.

   deliberately deviating from what is good

   “there will always be a few people who, through macho perversity, gain satisfaction from bullying and terrorism”

   Synonymsperversity

   Broaderevil

Other forms of perverseness

plural

perversenesses·

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.

Questions about perverseness

What does perverseness mean?

perverseness means "deliberate and stubborn unruliness and resistance to guidance or discipline". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in perverseness?

perverseness has 4 syllables: per-ver-se-ness. The stress falls on "ver".

What is another word for perverseness?

Close synonyms include contrariness, perversity, perversity. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is perverseness a common word?

perverseness is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.