[f. WELL a. + -NESS.] The state of being well or in good health.
Rather a nonce-wd. than of settled status like illness.
1654. Sir A. Johnston (Ld. Wariston), Diary (S.H.S.), II. 197. I … blessed God … for my daughter’s wealnesse.
c. 1655. Dor. Osborne, Lett., xxviii. (1903), 126. You … never send me any of the new phrases of the town…. Pray what is meant by wellness and unwellness?
1791. T. Twining, Recreat. & Stud. (1882), 145. When I say ‘well,’ I can’t be supposed to mean the wellness that one should predicate of a professor who makes those instruments his study.
1836. Carlyle, New Lett. (1904), I. 33. I feel really very well at present; and could almost persuade myself it were the natural state of wellness.
1864. Mrs. Carlyle, Lett., III. 210. Some weeks of such comparative ease and well-ness.
1896. Mrs. Drew, in A. C. Benson, Life Abp. Benson (1899), II. 774. We were all struck by his wellness.
1905. H. H. Colvill, Stepping Stone, 264. With an old man like that, wellness was illness, and illness didn’t seem not so very different from wellness.
