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
100 SAT Words Beginning with "B"
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A Christmas Carol
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"Nature" by Ralph Waldo Emerson
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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:
The blithe and often zany choreography unfolded intriguingly as its asymmetrical configurations—involving four men, three women and three folding chairs—kept the whole theatrical affair deftly off balance.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 27, 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
Instead, there was the blithe unselfconciousness of some crotchety old Veteran of Foreign Wars—married for years, father of multitudes—who finds the topic infinitely repugnant and amusing.
From "The Secret History" by Donna Tartt
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
No lad could have spoken with a blither face, for Moor had preserved much of the boy in spite of his thirty years.
From Moods by Louisa May Alcott
I will, without farther ensuing so dolorous a theme, begin with something blither and better, thereby perchance affording a good argument for that which is to be related on the ensuing day.
From The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio by John Payne
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
Outwardly, she was the blithest passenger on the steamer, and daily she held a sort of salon for the few other passengers who were doomed to the heat and the weariness of such a voyage.
From The Key to Yesterday by Charles Neville Buck
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.
