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English
Etymology
From listless + -ness.
Noun
listlessness (countable and uncountable, plural listlessnesses)
- The state of being listless; apathetic indifference; lethargy.
1749, [John Cleland], “(Please specify the letter or volume)”, in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure [Fanny Hill], London: for G. Fenton , →OCLC:But every thing must have an end. A motion made by this angelic youth, in the listlessness of going off sleep, replac'd his shirt and the bed-cloaths in a posture that shut up that treasure from longer view.
1815, Jane Austen, Emma, volume II, chapter 12:This sensation of listlessness, weariness, stupidity, this disinclination to sit down and employ myself, this feeling of every thing’s being dull and insipid about the house!— I must be in love; I should be the oddest creature in the world if I were not—for a few weeks at least.
1851 November 14, Herman Melville, “Chapter 35”, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC:[…] lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it.
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