meaningless

[mee-ning-lis]

adjective

1. without meaning, mean, meaning, significance, purpose, or value; purposeless; insignificant.

   a meaningless reply; a meaningless existence.

meaningless

/ ˈmiːnɪŋlɪs /

adjective

1. futile or empty of meaning

Other Word Forms

• meaninglessly adverb
• meaninglessness noun

Word History and Origins

Origin of meaningless¹

First recorded in 1790–1800; meaning + -less

Example Sentences

The stock market was just another encrypted transmission — meaningless statics hiding meaningful patterns.

Read more on MarketWatch

Combine this with its meaningless political gestures and you’re left with a film that is, creatively speaking, lost in the desert.

Read more on The Wall Street Journal

The entire food chain of intermediaries in the subprime mortgage market was duping itself with the same trick, using the foreshortened, statistically meaningless past to predict the future.

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"It's so meaningless that when I was at the New York Times, we had a policy that the paper wouldn't print the amount sued for," he told the BBC's World Tonight programme.

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And this is why, after making his return to the Real Madrid side after shoulder surgery, Bellingham will have even greater motivation to deliver in England's upcoming internationals, despite the wider outcome effectively being meaningless.

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Related Words

• absurd 
• empty 
• futile 
• hollow 
• inconsequential 
• insignificant 
• pointless 
• senseless 
• trivial 
• unimportant 
• useless 
• vague 
• worthless