mastiness
Mastiness is a rarely attested term whose meaning depends on context. In forestry and ecology, mast refers to the fruit of forest trees—acorns, beechnuts, chestnuts, and similar crops—that supply food for wildlife during certain seasons. When used, mastiness usually refers informally to the character or degree of mast production in a given year, i.e., how abundant the crop of nuts is. In sportsmanlike or naturalist writing, one might speak of a year’s mastiness to describe variability in resource availability for animals. In other uses, the word can appear as a playful or metaphorical coinage to mean the quality of something being like mast, though this is not standard or widely understood.
Etymology and status: The form is a back-formation from mast with the suffix -iness; it is not