The quality or state of being strange, unusual, or surprising; something that seems odd or difficult to understand.
From 'strange' (Old French 'estrange,' from Latin 'extraneus,' meaning foreign or external). The '-ness' suffix creates the noun form, and the word has meant 'unfamiliar' since the 1300s.
In particle physics, 'strangeness' is an actual technical property of quarks—one of the fundamental quantum numbers—so when physicists discovered weird particles that didn't fit existing models, they literally named this new property 'strangeness,' making a physics term out of an everyday word.
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