Definition of "preciousness" [pre•cious•ness]

• The condition of being precious; costliness (noun)

Wiktionary.org : Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License

• "It seems at least as likely, though, that she has succumbed to the baleful influence of Sarah Ruhl, whose stomach-turning brand of preciousness is the latest theatrical fashion and whose sticky stylistic fingerprints are all over The Language Archive."
• "Portia's post re Helene Hanff (another former favorite of mine with no love lost, just forgotten) reminds me of an aren't-kids-cute shorthand we often see in movies, sometimes books, where the kid's preciousness is proclaimed by his or her use of mathematically nonsensical numbers, like, "eleventy gazillion million TWILLION!""
• "If her reserve toward men protected her from slander, her apparent suppression of sexuality was also in keeping with the idea of "preciousness" then spreading through the salons of the capital."