extraneous
Americanadjective
-
introduced or coming from without; not belonging or proper to a thing; external; foreign.
extraneous substances in our water.
- Synonyms:
- alien, adventitious, extrinsic
- Antonyms:
- intrinsic
-
not pertinent; irrelevant.
an extraneous remark; extraneous decoration.
- Synonyms:
- superfluous, nonessential, inappropriate
adjective
-
not essential
-
not pertinent or applicable; irrelevant
-
coming from without; of external origin
-
not belonging; unrelated to that to which it is added or in which it is contained
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of extraneous
First recorded in 1630–40; from Latin extrāneus “external, foreign,” equivalent to extr(a)- extra- + -ān(us) -an + -eus -eous
Explanation
Extraneous means coming from the outside, like the extraneous noise you hear when you're in a theater and a train passes by. Extraneous can also mean not relevant or essential, like all the extraneous information in your long-winded science report. In Latin, extra means outside, as in extraordinary "outside the ordinary," or extraterrestrial 'coming from outside earth.' (Bonus points––ding! ding!––if you knew that terra is Latin for "earth.") The meaning of extraneous also extends to more abstract things that come from the outside: extraneous details are ones that don't matter.
Vocabulary lists containing extraneous
300 Most Difficult "SAT" Words
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Grade 11, List 5
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Good Riddance
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
It’s a great example of the more impressionistic lyrics on this record; they’re still telling the same kind of stories but with more compression, more editing, retaining what’s essential and rejecting anything extraneous.
From Salon ● Aug. 25, 2026
"The LNF is an amazing facility," Gong said, adding it was a painstaking process to meld the device's materials together in a way that didn't introduce any extraneous electric fields.
From Science Daily ● Jul. 28, 2026
Detours into Lindsay’s traumatic childhood, for example, and into her current profession as an audiobook narrator seem somewhat extraneous.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 15, 2026
"He was just quietly sitting there, taking script pages out, cutting them up, removing extraneous stuff like scene descriptions, and then sticking them back onto blank pages," he said.
From BBC ● Mar. 1, 2025
It was difficult to think of the ever-combative, highly combustible champion of the American Revolution as extraneous and invisible, but that is what the vice presidency had made him.
From "Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation" by Joseph J. Ellis
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
