obtuseness

[ uhb-toos-nis, -tyoos- ]

noun

1. lack of quickness, alertness, or sensitivity in perception, intellect, or feeling, often arising from conscious or unconscious resistance:

   What I find very tiresome is your willful obtuseness—your refusal to admit facts that are well-known or arguments you have lost.

2. the quality or degree of bluntness in physical form; lack of sharpness or acuteness:

   Platybasia is an abnormal obtuseness of the basal angle of the brain.

3. the fact or quality of being indistinctly felt or perceived, as pain or sound:

   The chief indication of deep-seated, pervasive inflammation seems to be the obtuseness of the pain.

Other Words From

• sub·ob·tuse·ness noun

Word History and Origins

Origin of obtuseness¹

First recorded in 1640–50; obtuse ( def ) + -ness ( def )

Example Sentences

Underscoring the grotesque moral obtuseness from the convention stage was the joyful display of generations as the president praised and embraced his offspring.

From Salon

He plays the victim vividly and is quite adept at showing the obtuseness of a know-it-all.

From Los Angeles Times

LadyBird’s question infuriates both her mother and her sister with its obtuseness.

From Los Angeles Times

The assurance with which Woods delivers Lauren’s jeremiads makes them funny, but the character is bearable because his guileless hypocrisy is also right on the surface — he constantly reveals himself to be guilty of exactly the kind of narrow-minded obtuseness he sees in everyone else.

From New York Times

“One needs an unbelievable degree of obtuseness, cruelty, and even barbarity to not feel at least some empathy for children dying on hospital floors, to a father crying over the body of his child, to an infant covered in the dust of his bombed house, looking in vain for someone in the world, for people living for two months in terror, in despair and with nothing left in their lives; for the hungry, the sick, the disabled and the dispossessed of the Gaza Strip,” he wrote in early January.

From Seattle Times

Related Words

• absurdity
• apathy
• idiocy
• ignorance
• lunacy
• nonsense
• silliness