kindness is the quality or state of being kind — of a sympathetic or helpful nature, gentle, and disposed to give pleasure or relief — and, in a countable sense, a kind deed done for another.
The word carries both a disposition and an act. As a disposition, kindness describes a settled inclination toward the good of others: forbearance where irritation would be easier, help offered without being asked. As an act, a kindness is a single favor, and the plural names a pattern of them. The adjective it is built on stretches across the same range, from a person's character (a kind man) to the effect of a thing (a climate kind to the joints).
Kindness entered English around 1300, formed from kind plus -ness. The adjective descends from Old English gecynde, "natural, native, innate," and shares its root with kin and with kind in the sense of "sort" or "family." Its earliest sense was the natural feeling of relatives toward one another; by the end of the thirteenth century it had widened to mean well-disposed, benign, and tender toward anyone. The etymology makes kindness, at root, the regard owed to one's own kind, extended outward.
Kindness is often set against niceness: niceness is pleasantness of manner, which can avoid friction at the cost of truth, while kindness aims at the other person's actual good and can include an unwelcome word. It also differs from 📝compassion, which is a response to suffering; kindness needs no wound to answer. The tension between being right and being kind is the subject of 📝Ryan Holiday's essay It's Not Enough to Be Right—You Also Have To Be Kind, and of a line 📝Jeff Bezos credits to his grandfather:
"one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.”
“The wicked are always surprised to find that the good can be clever.”
Kindness is one of the founding 📝One, Inc. // Values. I've written about it in 📝Spoken With Kindness and 📝Operating From Kindness, and learned its limit from a sunburnt fig in 📝Where They're At: too much light can harm, and kindness still requires consent.