blithe
Americanadjective
adjective
-
very happy or cheerful
-
heedless; casual and indifferent
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of blithe
First recorded before 1000; Middle English; Old English blīthe; cognate with Old Norse blīthr, Old High German blīdi, Gothic bleiths
Explanation
The adjective blithe used to mean happy and carefree, but over time it has also come to describe someone who isn't paying attention the way they should. If you have a blithe disregard for authority, you might just smile vaguely when a teacher is yelling at you and continue writing on the lockers with a Sharpie. If you're dancing to music while driving, and pass blithely through a red light, chances are you will be pulled over and given either a ticket or a lecture.
Vocabulary lists containing blithe
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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.
See Examples For:
Mr. Hilton has a blithe British manner and jokes about his un-Californian accent: “I have trouble saying ‘water’ in a way that people understand.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 29, 2026
That may give these companies an extra temporary boost, but consumers might not be so blithe, Malek warns.
From Barron's ● Apr. 27, 2026
Online, video edits have proliferated of Lively’s more blithe responses to questions about her character.
From BBC ● Aug. 24, 2024
In one blithe sentence, Shafik assumes into legitimacy the major institutions of liberal modernity and declares them partners in a cooperative project, without inquiring into whether or how these institutions might be democratically justified.
From Slate ● May 9, 2024
I give him my best blithe smile, like a girl who thinks she has solved everyone’s problems.
From "The Cruel Prince" by Holly Black
What kind of toxic passive-aggressive blither is that?
From Time ● Mar. 1, 2014
Lady Mary is, blithe and blither, on her way.
From Time Magazine Archive
As for his poetic effusions and snatches of writing, they are mostly fey blither.
From Time Magazine Archive
The General himself could not have uttered his piquant pleasantries in a blither tone than I did my impulsive defence of the right of private judgment.
From The Romance of a Plain Man by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
It occurred to me that, had we come to bury Byfield, not to praise him, we might have displayed a blither interest.
From The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) by Robert Louis Stevenson
Ms. Bouder, now often so mannered in ballets by George Balanchine, was at her freest and blithest.
From New York Times ● Feb. 23, 2018
If you are late for “Amy,” a new documentary about Amy Winehouse, you will miss her at her blithest.
From The New Yorker ● Jul. 1, 2015
Though its social scope is narrower than Hardy’s, you do come away from it with a true sense of the shrouded world that he devised, where fate could frown upon even the blithest day.
From The New Yorker ● Apr. 27, 2015
And it could soon strike Earth, ruining what should be baseball's blithest month.
From Time Magazine Archive
On the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth of April Seville annually keeps, on the Prado de San Sebastian, where the Inquisition used to light its fires, the blithest of spring festivals.
From Spanish Highways and Byways by Katharine Lee Bates
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Get a wordDefinitions 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.
