0 the quality of cruelly or unfairly not allowing people the freedom they should have: --
1 a quality that makes people feel worried or uncomfortable: --
2 the quality in weather of being uncomfortably hot with no wind: --
A hot night lay in breathless oppressiveness over the dark landscape.
It was a warm, sticky afternoon with sufficient oppressiveness to prompt thoughts of siesta.
There is a brooding oppressiveness to the silence that induces a feeling of unease.
We would never paint our home in such depressing colours, but for some reason we accept this oppressiveness in the office, factory or hospital.
She plays a suburban 1950s housewife stifled by the oppressiveness of her unfulfilling marriage.
The playwright evoked the suffocation of individuality and the oppressiveness of dictatorship.
His father told him to read Solzhenitsyn to better understand Communism's oppressiveness.
The latest cases illustrate the sheer oppressiveness of a law which can be used to punish or even ruin an enemy.