0 (of fruit or crops) the quality of being ready to be collected or eaten:
1 the quality of being fully developed:
His intellectual powers had come very gradually to ripeness.
2 the condition of having a very strong, usually unpleasant, smell:
3 (of someone's language) the fact of being very rude:
There are well-documented instances of the ripeness of his language to journalists.
People sometimes thump a watermelon to test its ripeness.
At end of the day, pickers sort the cherries according to their ripeness.
Mr Kennedy had reached his greatest ripeness of thought and experience when he published this volume.
The ripeness of the comedian's language deterred some audience members.
The stage of ripeness of the consumed fruits was scored as well, based on changes in size, colour and consistency.
Samples of 50 fruits per plant were harvested 20 days later once they reached full ripeness.
To control for differences in female ripeness, female body mass was corrected for the mass of the ovaries.
