The quality or state of being forgetful; habitual forgetfulness.
Formed from 'forget' plus the suffix '-ness,' which creates abstract nouns from adjectives. This follows the same pattern as 'darkness' from 'dark' or 'kindness' from 'kind,' dating back to Old English.
While 'forgetfulness' is the standard modern form, 'forgetness' appears in older texts and shows how English speakers experimented with different suffixes to express the same concept—'-ness' eventually became the preferred way to nominalize almost any adjective.
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