Curiousness

[TriggersBroom]

DS's homework (as usual) is to learn the spelling of several words and make a sentence out of them. This week's words all end in "ness" and one of them is "curiousness". I've googled it and it allegedly does exist, but my gut feeling is that "curiosity" is a more common/elegant noun for the state of being curious. Any comments?

BTW DS is 8. (And one of last week's words was "deepen" which I also felt was a bit weird.)

Deepen is fine. Curiousness seems odd though.

I've never heard 'curiousness' used before. Here's a sentence for Ds - "The state of being curious is curiosity, not curiousness".

Does 'curiousness' sound better if you think of 'strangeness' or 'oddness'?

Yes, I think you're right ElbowFan. I looked it up in the dictionary and Collins does cite "curiousness" as the noun for "curious". In the end, DS did a sentence using it in the sense of "strangeness". I was tempted by 80sMum's suggestion but DS vetoed it!
Thanks for your suggestions.