Emily Dickinson Lexicon

STRANGE'NESS, n.

1. Foreignness; the state of belonging to another country. If I will obey the Gospel, no distance of place, no strangeness, of country can make any man a stranger to me. – Sprat.
2. Distance in behavior; reserve; coldness; forbidding manner. Will you not observe / The strangeness of his alter'd countenance? – Shak.
3. Remoteness from common manners or notions; uncouthness. Men worthier than himself / Here tend the savage strangeness he puts on. – Shak.
4. Alienation of mind; estrangement; mutual dislike. This might seem a means to continue a strangeness between the two nations. – Bacon. [This sense is obsolete or little used.]
5. Wonderfulness; the power of exciting surprise and wonder; uncommonness that raises wonder by novelty. This raised greater tumults in the hearts of men, than strangeness and seeming unreasonableness of all the former articles. – South.