harmless
Americanadjective
-
without the power or desire to do harm; innocuous.
He looks mean but he's harmless; a harmless Halloween prank.
- Synonyms:
- benign, unobjectionable, innocent, mild, inoffensive
-
without injury; unhurt; unharmed.
idioms
adjective
-
not causing any physical or mental damage or injury
-
unlikely to annoy or worry people
a harmless sort of man
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of harmless
Explanation
Things that can't hurt you are harmless. It might be hard for you to believe her when your sister tells you that her enormous pet snake is completely harmless. If your friend is scared of dogs, you can reassure her by saying, "Sure, he's 150 pounds and has a loud bark, but Fido is harmless!" Things that are safe or benign don't cause harm, and are therefore harmless, like your dad's harmless teasing or a compostable paper plate that's harmless to the environment. The word harmless originally meant "uninjured," or "not harmed," and came to mean "undamaged" by the end of the 1300s.
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.
Suzanne Sando, a lead analyst in fraud management at Javelin Strategy & Research, says people often underestimate how much information can be pieced together from what feels like harmless conversation.
From The Wall Street Journal • May 28, 2026
This does not mean pretending $100-plus oil is harmless.
From MarketWatch • May 22, 2026
To fans, publicity stunts like the opening of The Situation Room bar might seem harmless.
From BBC • May 21, 2026
Techniques such as “receiver operating characteristic curve analysis” examine how changing the threshold for an alert alters the balance between correctly identifying real events and mistakenly flagging harmless ones.
From Salon • May 12, 2026
All of these would have rendered him harmless, except that he also had staring blue eyes, eyes that could read everything that was going on underneath my forehead.
From "Jacob Have I Loved" by Katherine Paterson
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.
