atrabiliousness

noun

1. (obsolete, uncountable)The state or quality of being atrabilious.

   “Furthermore, the urine of some was both profuse and pale, autopsies showed that the dead had very swollen liver, blackened heart emitting a pale yellow liquid and later, black blood, black and semiputrefied spleen and lungs; atrabiliousness could be seen in their blood vessels, the dry stomach and the rest of the body, wherever it was dissected, was extremely pale.”

   “The fruits are small oranges and are used in mixtures serving as preservative, antidote to bacteria, softening of the heat effects of diseases, atrabiliousness, debility, and infirmity.”

2. (uncountable)The state or quality of being atrabilious.

   “Of his [Samuel Johnson's] works; though they have little of originality, and his ſtyle has a certain atrabiliouſneſs, and his tiſſue of paragraphs an unpleaſing quaintneſs, it must be confeſſed that his Dictionary, Rambler, and the two imitative translations of tranſlations of Juvenal, &c. are very excellent; […]”

   “Drummond, whose gorge had risen at these evidences of hopeless incapacity and utter shiftlessness, was not relieved by the presence of Mrs. Reed – a soured, disappointed woman of forty, who still carried in her small dark eyes and thin handsome lips something of the bitterness and antagonism of the typical "Southern rights" woman; nor of her two daughters, Octavia and Augusta, whose languid atrabiliousness seemed a part of the mourning they still wore.”

   “Terry, author of the indispensable Terry's Guide to Mexico, has a name for it – atrabiliousness. "The defect of many of the murals," he says, speaking of those in the orphan asylum, "is the facial atrabiliousness of some of the subjects. To the observer it minimizes the grandeur of the conception […]"”

   “The text is 'suffused with decorous domesticity', which, [Richard] Altick has argued, is due to its rigorous omission of the 'idiosyncrasies that made [[Alfred, Lord] Tennyson] the engaging and often formidable character he was – his vanity, his atrabiliousness [and] his shaggy Lincolnshire abruptness.'”