strangeness
strangeness Lexical Profile
strangeness Game Scores & Validity
• noun
The quality or state of being unusual, peculiar, or difficult to understand.
"The sheer strangeness of the surrealist painting captivated everyone in the gallery."
The condition of being unfamiliar, foreign, or alien to a person's experience.
"After a few weeks in the new city, the initial strangeness of the surroundings began to fade."
A fundamental quantum property of certain subatomic particles, governed by the presence of strange quarks, that is conserved during strong and electromagnetic interactions but not during weak interactions.
"In particle physics, the conservation of strangeness helps explain why kaons and hyperons decay much more slowly than initially expected."
Word Origin & Etymology
Formed in Middle English from the adjective 'strange' (derived via Old French from Latin 'extraneus', meaning 'foreign' or 'external') and the native suffix '-ness'. In 1953, physicists Murray Gell-Mann and Kazuhiko Nishijima adopted the term to describe a newly discovered quantum property that explained the unexpectedly slow decay of certain subatomic particles.