rightness
Americannoun
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correctness or accuracy.
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propriety or fitness.
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moral integrity.
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Obsolete. straightness or directness.
noun
Etymology
Origin of rightness
before 950; Middle English; Old English rihtnes. See right, -ness
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
We tend to believe that legality establishes rightness, establishes legitimacy.
From Slate ● Feb. 3, 2026
The simile is arresting: modern European proponents of welfare-state liberalism likened to a dying class of 19th-century hereditary nobles, confident in their rightness and desperate to rest.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 5, 2025
The sensation of taste and the pleasure food brings versus the maintaining of a sense of rightness in how we pursue these pleasures.
From Salon ● Apr. 28, 2024
“The one way to preserve and defend a place’s rightness is to inhabit it, intimate, knowledgeable, and vigilant as can be.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 8, 2023
They rolled down the homestretch for the first time, and Pollard felt the rightness of Seabiscuit’s stride, the smooth strumming under him.
From "Seabiscuit: An American Legend" by Laura Hillenbrand
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Get a wordDefinitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
