near
Mars is a fiery colour because of its nearness to the sun.
The town is popular with tourists because of its nearness to the ocean.
Opposition to the new airstrip focused on the nearness of the proposed site to a wildlife refuge.
Some people say that the nearness of death focuses the mind.
He said that the nearness of the election made it inappropriate for him to comment.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Closeness in distance and time
a few stepsidiom
a hair's breadthidiom
a stone's throwidiom
about
ace
anywhere
anywhere nearidiom
approachable
around
float
float around
hand to handidiom
hard by
proximately
proximity
roof
round the corneridiom
shadow
shout
step

Examples of nearness

nearness
The price per litre of the fermented product is a function of nearness to the markets.
This is because it may be our nearness to a threat to distant people that is morally relevant.
What is nearness if, along with its failure to appear, remoteness also remains absent?
Something similar occurs in colleges as nearness and availability overwhelm all other considerations.
Syntactic structure, semantic content, and nearness or adjacency all play a separate role in determining how good one or another agreement form is.
The nearness diagram approach17 is a situated-activity reasoning system which, based on the sensor information, identifies the situation and determines the corresponding action.
What is nearness if it is even repelled by the restless abolition of distances?
More generally, the asymptotic nearness of f and f is an open question.
The neighbourhoods, in effect, encode 'nearness', though in a less quantitative way than if there were a metric (distance function).
But the nearness of their marketing to schools involved police powers and education, decidedly state functions, and as such predominant.
Yet the frantic abolition of all distances brings no nearness; for nearness does not consist in shortness of distance.
What is nearness if it fails to come about despite the reduction of the longest distances to the shortest intervals?
This time, it is nearness of my means and the victim's means.
His suggestion was to use multiple properties (nearness to some specified chemical composition) in his simulation of the genetics and chemistry of a population of single-celled organisms.
Short distance is not in itself nearness.
See all examples of nearness
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.