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OneKitly

meaningless

adjectivecommon in dialogue

  • //ˈmiː.nɪŋ.ləs//

Lacking meaning.

adjective

  1. 1

    Lacking meaning.

    The word "gugugu" is meaningless in English.

    As the years go by, speech reverts to childhood levels of disfluency, with more pauses, more errors, more repeated words, but even the peak years are not great: up to 8 percent of the average person’s word output consists of meaningless fillers and placeholders like um, uh and er.

  2. 2

    Insignificant; not worthy of importance.

    All our efforts were ultimately meaningless.

    Whether modern, industrial man is less or more warlike than his hunter-gatherer ancestors is impossible to determine. The machine gun is so much more lethal than the bow and arrow that comparisons are meaningless.

Etymology

Etymology tree English meaning Proto-Indo-European *lewh₁- Proto-Indo-European *lewHs-der. Proto-Germanic *leusaną Proto-Germanic *lausaz Proto-Germanic *-lausaz Proto-West Germanic *-laus Old English -lēas Middle English -les English -less English meaningless From meaning + -less.

Forms

comparative
more meaningless
superlative
most meaningless
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).