The quality of being funereal; a gloomy or solemn character or appearance.
Funereal + -ness (Old English suffix forming abstract nouns from adjectives). The -ness suffix, inherited from Germanic roots, is one of the most productive noun-forming suffixes in English, appearing in thousands of words like sadness, darkness, and kindness.
English gives us multiple ways to turn an adjective into a noun expressing its quality—-ity, -ness, and sometimes just using the adjective as a noun—and we often use them interchangeably, which is a bit wasteful but gives poets and writers stylistic choices.
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