Fondness
nounA feeling of warm affection, liking, or tender attachment toward someone or something.
How to spell fondness
8 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce fondness
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does fondness mean?
- nounA feeling of warm affection, liking, or tender attachment toward someone or something.
Fondness in a sentence
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Her fondness for old jazz records grew with every visit to the market.
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He spoke of his first employer with genuine fondness.
Where does fondness come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
The heart of this word is the adjective 'fond', which began life with a surprisingly unflattering meaning. In Middle English the form was 'fonned', the past participle of the verb 'fonnen', meaning 'to be foolish', which itself came from 'fon', a noun for a fool or simpleton. To be 'fond' originally meant to be silly or doting, and over the 1500s the sense softened from foolishly infatuated to warmly affectionate, which is the meaning we keep today. The ending '-ness' is a native Old English suffix that turns an adjective into the name of its quality, exactly as it does in 'kindness' and 'darkness'. So 'fondness' literally bundles together 'being fond' as a single abstract noun, and the spelling is simply the adjective plus that suffix, with no letters lost or added.
How the word is built
- fond (tender, affectionate)
- -ness (suffix forming an abstract noun denoting a state or quality)
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