The quality of being answerable; the state of being able to answer or respond to something.
Formed from answerable (able to answer) plus the suffix -ness, which comes from Old English and creates abstract nouns denoting qualities or conditions.
This is an older English way of saying the same thing as 'answerability'—during the 1600s and 1700s, writers used both forms interchangeably, but -ness words gradually became less common in favor of -ity versions for more abstract concepts.
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