remoteness
/rɪˈməʊtnəs
/noun [mass noun]
1The state of being distant from something else, in particular from the main centres of population: the remoteness of the location hindered development...
- What strikes the traveller is the Taiga's utter remoteness.
- The cries of circling gulls add to the eerie sense of remoteness.
- He said most rental cars do not last for a long time given the remoteness of some of the places the tourists take them.
2Lack of connection with or relationship to something: the remoteness of politics from everyday life...
- The art installation suggests the continuity and fragility of Mediterranean civilization, reminding us of the simultaneous remoteness and seamlessness of the past.
- She wrote: "To possess the world in the form of images is, precisely, to reexperience the unreality and remoteness of the real".
- The emptiness of their canvases "proclaimed their remoteness from consumer culture and the world of things".
3The state of being unlikely to occur: the remoteness of a solution...
- Despite its remoteness, this risk is untenable.
- There is a wider, non-legal sensibility through which people identify injury by adhering to physical symptoms, to familiar relationships, to the remoteness or proximity of harm.
- There are no specific provisions in the Animals Act 1971 dealing with the question of remoteness of damage.
4The quality of being aloof and unfriendly: his diffidence could sometimes be misread as remoteness...
- She remembered a remoteness in her stepfather; she saw in him the figure of a man conflicted about involving himself emotionally in the activities of his children.
- He had a certain remoteness, even pomposity.
- If absence and remoteness do not destroy friendship, they attenuate or exhaust it, they enervate it.