stiffness

Other forms of stiffness

plural

stiffnesses·

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 stiffness

What does stiffness mean?

stiffness means "the physical property of being inflexible and hard to bend". That is the primary sense; the word has 5 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in stiffness?

stiffness has 2 syllables: stiff-ness. The stress falls on "stiff". In IPA it is /ˈstɪfnəs/.

What is another word for stiffness?

Close synonyms include awkwardness, clumsiness, gracelessness, severity, severeness. 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 stiffness a common word?

stiffness is banded "Uncommon" — turns up in careful writing rather than conversation. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.