n. The state or character of being sudden, in any sense; a coming or happening without previous notice.
WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
n. the quality of happening with headlong haste or without warning
Word Usage
"“Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness,” he wrote in these pages in 1897, “that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.”"