unsuspiciousness

unsuspiciousness

English

Etymology

From unsuspicious +‎ -ness.

Noun

unsuspiciousness (uncountable)

1. The quality of being unsuspicious (of something); lack of suspicion; lack of awareness.
   • 1814 July, [Jane Austen], chapter XVI, in Mansfield Park: […], volume III, London: […] T[homas] Egerton, […], OCLC 39810224, page 316:

     No, her's^[sic] is not a cruel nature. I do not consider her as meaning to wound my feelings. The evil lies yet deeper; in her total ignorance, unsuspiciousness of there being such feelings, in a perversion of mind which made it natural to her to treat the subject as she did.

   • 1855, Richard Burton, A Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah, Volume I, Chapter 4,

     All I required in return for my services from the slave-dealer, whose brutal countenance and manners were truly repugnant, was to take me about the town, and explain to me certain mysteries in his craft, which knowledge might be useful in time to come. Little did he suspect who his interrogator was, and freely in his unsuspiciousness he entered upon the subject of slave hunting in the Somali country, and Zanzibar, of all things the most interesting to me.

   • 1911, H. G. Wells, The New Machiavelli, Book IV, II, § 2,

     In a few brief weeks it seemed London passed from absolute unsuspiciousness to a chattering exaggeration of its knowledge of our relations.

2. (rare) The quality of not arousing suspicion.
   • 1862, James Caleb Jackson, The Sexual Organism, and its Healthful Management, Boston: B. Leverett Emerson, Chapter 7, p. 64,

     A mother is always more familiar with her son than a father is with his daughter, in the direction of any conditions that may grow out of their respective sexualities. Owing to this, masturbation is practised with much more unsuspiciousness by girls than by boys, especially at or about the time of puberty.