humbleness comes from humble + -ness; humble comes via Old French from Latin humilis ('low, lowly'), from humus ('ground, earth'). Morphologically, the ending is part of the etymology: the suffix is attached to the older base named in the history, producing a later English derivative. In present English, the noun sense is "the quality of being modest and without arrogance", so the historical development ends in a clearly identifiable modern dictionary use. The same base also appears in related forms such as humble, humbly, and humiliate. Its semantic neighborhood includes humility, modesty, meekness, and lowliness, which helps locate the modern sense without adding a separate etymological claim. The named historical forms include Latin humilis and Latin humus.