heartless
Americanadjective
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unfeeling; unkind; unsympathetic; harsh; cruel.
heartless words; a heartless ruler.
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Archaic. lacking courage or enthusiasm; spiritless; disheartened.
adjective
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of heartless
1300–50; Middle English herteles, Old English heortlēas. See heart, -less
Explanation
Someone who's heartless is inconsiderate and insensitive to other people's feelings. It would be heartless to smash a little kid's carefully carved Jack o' lantern. A heartless person might respond glibly to a friend's sad story about his sick grandmother, or push a hungry cat out the door on a rainy night. If you're heartless, you're cold and uncaring. Another, older meaning of this adjective is "lacking courage," from the Old English heortleas, "dispirited or dejected." The modern meaning was coined by poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1816.
Vocabulary lists containing heartless
"The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet," Vocabulary from Act 1
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"The Clever Old Woman" and "Argument"
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Adventures of Don Quixote
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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.
Heartless, she wants a bigger story, something that would put her byline on the front page.
From Los Angeles Times • Aug. 7, 2025
Taking a chance is a motto that Heartless Crew adopted when helping to evolve garage from the 1990s.
From BBC • Aug. 16, 2024
The "Heartless" rapper went further to claim that security hadn't let him enter the home because Kardashian's new boyfriend was inside.
From Fox News • Jan. 15, 2022
Frontwoman Erika Wennerstrom found the incorrect response of “Tom Petty and the Heartless Bastards” funny and thus, Heartless Bastards was born.
From Washington Post • Sep. 28, 2021
This was such a fraud as one sees recorded in the papers that meticulously record squalor in paragraphs headed, "Heartless Fraud on Soldier's Wife."
From The Return of the Soldier by West, Rebecca
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.
