The state or quality of being gilded; the condition of having been covered with gold or gold-colored coating.
From gilded (past participle of gild) + -ness (state or quality). The -ness suffix creates abstract nouns from adjectives, a pattern used thousands of times in English.
Notice how English lets us stack suffixes: gild → gilded → gildedness. That's three layers of word-building, each one adding a new layer of meaning like... well, like gilding itself! This linguistic 'gilding' shows how we build complexity from simple roots.
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